The Archaeology of Seeing: Science and Interpretation, the Past and Contemporary Visual Art [1 ed.] 036736025X, 9780367360252

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THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF SEEING

The Archaeology of Seeing provides readers with a new and provocative understanding of material culture through exploring visual narratives captured in cave and rock art, sculpture, paintings, and more. The engaging argument draws on current thinking in archaeology, on how we can interpret the behaviour of people in the past through their use of material culture, and how this affects our understanding of how we create and see art in the present. Exploring themes of gender, identity, and story-telling in visual material culture, this book forces a radical reassessment of how the ability to see makes us and our ancestors human; as such, it will interest lovers of both art and archaeology. Illustrated with examples from around the world, from the earliest art from hundreds of thousands of years ago, to the contemporary art scene, including street art and advertising, Janik cogently argues that the human capacity for art, which we share with our most ancient ancestors and cousins, is rooted in our common neurophysiology. The ways in which our brains allow us to see is a common heritage that shapes the creative process; what changes, according to time and place, are the cultural contexts in which art is produced and consumed. The book argues for an innovative understanding of art through the interplay between the way the human brain works and the culturally specific creation and interpretation of meaning, making an important contribution to the debate on art/archaeology. Liliana Janik is Assistant Director of Research, Deputy Director at the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre, and Fellow of Girton College, University of Cambridge. She leads research projects in Japan and Russia. She specialises in prehistoric art: rock art, sculpture, and neuroaesthetic approaches to art, as well as heritage of the landscape.

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF SEEING Science and Interpretation, the Past and Contemporary Visual Art

Liliana Janik Illustrated by Adam Szczę sny

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Liliana Janik The right of Liliana Janik to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Janik, Liliana, author. | Szczę sny, Adam, illustrator. Title: The archaeology of seeing : science and interpretation, the past and the contemporary visual art / Liliana Janik ; illustrated by Adam Szczę sny. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019034772 (print) | LCCN 2019034773 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367360252 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367360221 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429343339 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Art–Psychology. | Art and society. | Archaeology and art. Classification: LCC N71 .J36 2020 (print) | LCC N71 (ebook) | DDC 700.1/9–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034772 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034773 ISBN: 978-0-367-36025-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-36022-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-34333-9 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK

for Simon and Kasia, the travel companions

Everything my body remembers is older than any form of memory and my hands are archaeologists Leiko Ikemura

CONTENTS

Preface

xi

Introduction

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How contemporary is prehistoric art? Introduction 5 Defining visual vocabulary 6 Visual art and the brain 9 Neurophysiology 14 The brain: the way we see 15 Seeing colour 18 Seeing line 21 Seeing the face 25 Seeing the body 28 Seeing motion 32 Seeing abstract images and beyond 35 Summary 38 Bibliography 38

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The origins of art Introduction 44 Visual perception and art 44 The art object and the artist: art history 48 Giorgio Vasari 48 Johann Joachim Winckelmann 50

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Contemporary approaches 51 Conceptual art 53 The art object and the artist: archaeology 56 Archaeological objects, beauty and aesthetics 58 Classification of archaeological style 59 Evolutionism 61 Visual art and archaeology 64 Summary 65 Bibliography 66 3

The gallery: unveiling visual narrative Introduction 70 Self-portraiture as figurines and sculptures 71 The body 71 Agency of seeing 72 Autogenous sculpture 73 Experiential art and autogenous sculpture 78 Gallery of seeing 79 2D story-telling 79 Agency of seeing and 2D visual narrative 80 Landscape 83 Story-telling in 3D 84 Moving in the landscape 86 Viewpoint 86 Viewpoints and prehistoric rock art 90 Picture plane 93 The picture plane and prehistoric rock art 96 Agency of seeing and 3D visual narrative 99 Kinetic art 100 Kinetic art as a visual illusion 101 Movement as the superimposition of a sequence of events 101 Movement as a juxtaposition of successive events 102 Kinetic art – movement per se 104 Shape-shifting and the agency of seeing 107 Summary 110 Bibliography 110

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Power of display: the artist and the object Introduction 114 What makes an artist? 114 What is an art object? 118 The artist and the object 121

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Contents

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Who are the artists? 121 The art object 128 Human body as an art object 132 Summary 142 Bibliography 142 5

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Embodiment and disembodiment: the corporeality of visual art and interwoven landscapes Introduction 148 The concept of visual narrative 149 Climate, environment and the first European artist 151 Sculpture 155 Kostenki 1, layer 1, complex 1 157 Performativity, fragmentation and dividuality at Kostenki 1 160 Avdeevo 162 Performativity, fragmentation and dividuality at Avdeevo 165 Gagarino 166 Performativity, fragmentation and dividuality at Gagarino 168 The body from ego to allocentric 169 The brain and the artistic choices 172 The naked (and almost) undressed body 174 Fragmented bodies 177 Palaeolithic visual vocabulary 178 Substance 179 Landscape and the actor-network theory 181 The actors/figurines in the landscape 182 Figurines from Joˉ mon Japan 185 Materiality of fragmentation 185 Connecting the landscape 187 Summary 189 Bibliography 189 Portraiture and the reverence of the other Introduction 194 The concept of portraiture 194 Generic portraiture 197 Referential portraiture 199 The Princes of Vix 200 Hochdorf 203 Representational portraiture 205 The Moche 206

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Sacrifice Ceremony 206 Individual lives in the Sacrifice Ceremony 212 The idea materialised 214 Summary 216 Bibliography 217 7

Conclusion Bibliography 231

Index

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233

PREFACE

Art has never been more ubiquitous, more accessible, or more contested than it is today. Now everyone can be an artist. And in this digital age the tools available to artists to convey their intentions have never been more powerful. Art is no longer restricted to the studio, the gallery or the collection. Art is everywhere – even being launched into outer space. This book is an attempt to understand how we have arrived at this situation, and how art is so deeply implicated in the human condition. I explore here prehistoric visual art as part of the wider phenomenon of nonverbal communication and establish linkages with the contemporary art world. Its main themes cross-cut major contemporary archaeological topics used in interpreting past communities through the analysis of the surviving traces of the visual aspects of their material culture. These topics include the role of visual material culture in creating and recreating group and personal identities; gender; communicating emotion through visual culture; the use of visual narrative in non-verbal communication within particular social contexts; and story-telling. The book has three major objectives. It explores the role of the visual arts in creating and changing social and individual identities, using examples from culturally and economically different communities. It examines the relationship between visual art studies and archaeology, through a fresh look at how the visual arts impact our interpretations of the past as well as how major archaeological discoveries affect the world of art and artists. And it thinks through the theoretical and methodological concepts used in the formal and iconographic understanding of past and present, engaging in new ways with themes of portraiture; embodiment and disembodiment; performativity and gender; habitus and actor-network theory. These objectives are drawn together through an engagement with the field of neuroaesthetics, a fascinating new area of research

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which, based on the latest research into how the human brain works, has made great strides in understanding how art contributes to making us human. The book explores new directions in the study of visual culture, by illuminating processes of non-verbal communication through visual art in the past, where the cultural context of creating such images and objects was substantially different from the modern day. The archaeological basis for the book challenges both how and what we see as human beings, and the way artists through time reflect the visual preferences of the cultures they lived in. The centre of the enquiry is the relationship between material culture and contemporary understanding of what art is. I am not an artist. I identify very much as an archaeologist, and privilege archaeological discourse over other interpretations. I believe that it is only archaeology that can bring a new perspective to the understanding of art from its origins and the development of the creative process over the last hundred thousand years. Archaeology provides the bridge between the theoretical concept and topics brought to bear on past and present art objects, treating art both as part of human material culture and as part of the capacity of being human. The study of the relationship between art and archaeology is thriving as never before. We have witnessed a tremendous outpouring of creativity in art and archaeology projects at the same time as major new discoveries from the most ancient past have transformed our understanding of the origins and breath of the human artistic endeavor. Many excavations now have on site artists, although it is perhaps fair to say that not so many artists’ studios have yet been subjected to archaeological investigation: maybe that is yet to come. The book has been a long time in the writing, and many of the ideas it contains have benefitted greatly from feedback and questioning by generations of students who have attended my classes at the University of Cambridge and elsewhere, from colleagues who have sat through my presentations at numerous academic conferences and workshops, and discussions with my co-researchers during fieldwork in Russia and Japan. I want to thank all those individuals and organisations who have facilitated and enabled my journey through the worlds of art and archaeology. These include the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge, which, under the leadership of successive directors (Colin Renfrew, Graeme Barker and Cyprian Broodbank) has so generously supported so many of my projects and travels; the Templeton Foundation and the British Academy which funded my fieldwork on the prehistoric rock art of the White Sea on northern Russia; and the Mistresses (Marilyn Strathern and Susan Smith) and Fellows of Girton College for providing such a conducive atmosphere for research over the years. A number of colleagues inspired me, others have read and commented on the text, encouraging me to see the project through to completion, in particular: Dana Arnold, Ben Davenport, Jenny Blackhurst, Barbara Bodenhorn, Jim Bond, Katherine Boyle, Chris Evans, Joakim Goldhahn, Leiko Ikemura, Taketo Kobayashi, Ken Mulvaney, Paul Pettit, Yelena Popova,

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Mark Sapwell, Marie Louise Sørensen and Marilyn Strathern. I am also grateful all of my students whose questions made me clarify my ideas, in particular Rachel Bingham, Jessica Cooney-Williams, Sarah Evans, Tuukka Kaikkonen, Yingwen Tao and Valery The. My gratitude goes to Libor Balák, Banksy, Jim Bond, Antony Gormley, Leiko Ikemura, Chris Levine and Cornelia Parker, who most generously allowed me to use their works of art without any charges. My gratitude goes also to Nicholas Conard and Christopher Donnan, who allowed me to use their imges of the ancient objects. I want to acknowledge those closest to me who have inspired me and provided support throughout my academic career: Kasia and Adam, who redrew and adapted the images that adorn not only this book, Hanna and Rita for being the best of friends. My special thanks go to Simon without whom this book would not have ever happened. At the end, although by no means least, I want to say thank you to Carol Smith and the ‘morning coffee and tea drinkers’ in the McD for sharing the lighter side of life.

INTRODUCTION

This book proposes a new perspective on the understanding of art, from its origins and the subsequent development of the creative process from the period when humans started using visual communication as we understand it today, to the present. The archaeologically based perspective refers here to both how and what we see as human beings, and the way different artists reflect the visual preferences of the cultures they live in. The centre of the enquiry is material culture, strongly set within archaeological practice: the way we define, describe and interpret material culture. The book explores new directions in the study of visual culture, by illuminating processes of non-verbal communication through visual art in the past, where the cultural context of creating such images and objects was substantially different from the modern day. By using a number of theoretical concepts applied to the visual culture of various periods the book builds its own methodology by actively crossing disciplinary boundaries. The volume provides a set of approaches applied to visual art that spans millennia, and is designed to be of use to archaeologists, art historians and anthropologists. The book is constructed in such a way that each of the chapters can stand on its own without the linear development of the argument. The choice of such construction lies in the focus on the variety of material culture united under the umbrella of visual art understanding as a part of human creative endeavour. It also dictates the presentation of the images as one unified visual unit, hence redrawing all and not dividing them in terms of high art versus craft, renaissance art versus primitive art, by the past versus the present. The images are used as visual localisers of the ideas, and that is the reason for repeating some of them in various chapters, giving the reader visual reference points. The discussion of visual communication through millennia starts with a question posed at the outset of Chapter 1, How contemporary is prehistoric

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Introduction

art? This chapter introduces the themes of the book, including the relationship between visual art studies, the anthropology of art and archaeology, and the role of visual arts in the interpretation of the past. I argue that the human brain has capacity in recognising images and visual narratives through the way it is ‘physiologically wired’, and by culturally defined categories that give meanings to what we see. The perception of vision is dependent on the way knowledge is generated not only through the capacities of our brain, but also through culturally and socially generated process, and this is one of the major aspects of seeing that makes a difference in what and how we see. Therefore, our experiences constitute a vital part in the way we make sense of what we see, and that is the cultural context from which we interpret art. I address these issues by incorporating a number of methodological strands in interpreting prehistoric art and material culture, as well as referring to Western and non-Western visual traditions that challenge our (modern, Western) ways of seeing. I propose that this can provide us with a new method that leads to an understanding of intentionality in prehistoric art. This chapter builds on thinking through various examples of visual images and material culture: Palaeolithic paintings and sculpture, Australian traditional paintings, Classicist etching, modern and contemporary art in particular Jim Bond, Paddy Carlton, Antony Gormley, Hans Hartung, Damien Hirst, Meyndert Hobbema, Julian Opie, Cormelia Parker, Giovanni-Battista Piranesi. The origins of art and the gallery – unveiling visual narrative are discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. This relates to the framework established in Chapter 1, and key themes include the relationship between visual art studies and archaeology, and the role of visual arts in the interpretation of the past. I discuss in Chapter 2, how the understanding of prehistoric art has developed with the democratisation of art over recent years, and how contemporary art itself is shaping our interpretation of early art works and influencing the debate about the origins of art. The issues presented include: formal versus iconographic approaches to visual imagery; style; context; representation; aesthetics; the nature of the ‘image’; and the role of typology in the context of past visual cultures. Chapter 3, ‘the gallery – unveiling visual narrative’, concentrates on the idea of display and the control taken by artists in leading us through the images they create, the theme I return to in Chapter 6. By seeing we acquire knowledge of the world around us: this knowledge can be negotiated by those who create images. I argue here that this negotiation of the image, what the artist wanted us to see first and subsequently, and how they construct the composition for us to follow their lead, are essential questions in understanding art. Understanding the display of such images, either as seen all at once or slowly unveiled in front of our eyes while we walk along, requires an appreciation of the techniques used by both past and present artists in guiding the viewer through the visual narrative as part of non-verbal story-telling. To achieve the intended aim, artists use the capability of the brain in dealing with visual ‘noise’ and ‘silence’, as well as the placement of particular images and/or compositions in such a way that the viewer visually responds to them in the way the

Introduction

3

artist implicitly or explicitly intended. The chapters use examples of visual images and material culture, including the prehistoric cave art of France and rock art of the White Sea, Greek and Hellenistic sculpture, Medieval, Renaissance and Christian iconographic works and ideas of artists like Banksy, Jim Bond, Pieter Bruegel the Younger, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Henri Duchamp, Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley, Annie Leibovitz, Leiko Ikemura, Henri Matisse, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, Diego Rivera, and Gavin Turk. Chapter 4, Power of display: the artist and the object, focuses on what archaeologists mean by the terms ‘art’ and ‘artist’, and what place do such terms have in an archaeological understanding of past societies? I also critically examine a series of key concepts in art historical analysis and anthropology, and their use by archaeologists. When can art first be recognised in the archaeological record? Did art appear in Africa or Europe? Who created it: Homo sapiens? Or can it be linked with the Neanderthals? How can discoveries of very early art in other parts of the world be integrated into ‘grand narratives’ about the development of art? In particular, I concentrate on how the notion of art challenges our traditional understanding of what it means to be human. This chapter builds on thinking through more examples of visual imagery and material culture, including the Palaeolithic paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet caves, Neanderthal and Homo sapiens early ornaments and sculpture from Africa and Europe, late 19th and early 20th century ornamental art, Banksy, and the use of tattoos from tomb of Pazyryk to David Beckham. Chapter 5, Embodiment and disembodiment: the corporeality of visual art and interwoven landscapes, discusses the concepts of embodiment and disembodiment, and the corporality of visual art. It continues the argument of the book by engaging with a series of different approaches to the visual arts. The concepts of self-portraiture, fragmentation, performativity, dividuality and the ways in which the visual medium play an active role in social and symbolic aspects of prehistoric societies are presented. The corporeality of self has been explored by artists for at least 30,000 years. Self-expression captured in selfportraits of artists own bodies allowed artists to concentrate on themselves and is the first known portraiture. These artists extended the physicality of self by creating figurines, representations of the self without faces, where the body is both subject and object in moderating social and cultural spaces, and where both social and private space extends to the world they occupied in the process of embodiment and disembodiment. Examples include European Palaeolithic and Japanese Jomon sculpture, Christian iconography including the works of Gian Lorenzo Bernin, Alonzo Cano, Albert Dürer, Claude-de Jongh, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, as well as Jim Bond and Antony Gormley. Chapter 6, Portraiture and the reverence of the other, considers the emergence of one of the most significant aspects of art, portraiture: displaying the self and the other, the role of the artist, and in particular the role of portraiture in different social contexts in past and contemporary societies. In particular I examine in detail the concept of ‘secondary agency’ and the ways in which

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Introduction

the visual medium played an active role in social and symbolic aspects of prehistoric societies. The cognitive abilities of knowing our own bodies and bodies of others through our own capacities are related to the stimulation of various regions of the brain, and cognitive capacity of defining the self as a corporeal being is a second aspect of the relationship between the brain and cultural choices. The ideas of aesthetics and ‘habitus’ are employed to develop an understanding of portraiture as a form of generic, referential and representational indexing of the individual. Examples in this chapter include European Iron Age art, Moche pottery from Peru and the portrait created in the Medieval period as well as by Chris Levine, John Tenniela and Tracey Emin. The final chapter, Chapter 7, concludes the book by focusing on the issues of indexing by visual art via bringing together the ideas and examples presented in previous chapters to discuss what it means to be human in the context of nonverbal visual communication. In particular I discuss the importance of understanding prehistoric art via contemporary concepts and ideas, which in turn brings the past to the present, not only in the intellectual sphere of discussing visual art, but also by following the intentionality of artists as masters of visual communication and us as recipients of those messages. For those readers who would like to explore visual art through the medium of the written word, I suggest that the following readings might be of interest: Arnold, Dana (2004). Art History: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pamuk, Orhan (2011). My Name is Red, London: Faber & Faber. Somoza, Jose Carlos (2005). The Art of Murder, London: Abacus. Strathern, Marylin (1988). The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia, Berkeley: University of California Press.

1 HOW CONTEMPORARY IS PREHISTORIC ART?

Introduction This chapter presents a series of points of view, inspirations and ideas that are used in the rest of the book as background for the engagement between interpretation of past visual imagery, material culture and a range of theoretical perspectives. When talking about art one needs to use illustrations to avoid a lack of visual comprehension of the subject of the writing. Discussions of visual art without the use of pictures is comparable to trying to describe flint tools to someone who has only heard that tools can be made from stone, and trying to explain verbally how the object might look, where the cutting edge is, or how to handle it. To avoid such problems I use many illustrations to communicate visually the ideas being discussed in this book, along with a written narrative that presents my interpretation of prehistoric visual art. Until the 17th century most Europeans’ engagement with art did not involve seeing the original object at all, and all they could do was read about it. It was only with the advent of the Grand Tour, when travellers brought etchings home with them as reminders of what they had seen, that images of art objects began to be shared more widely, including those remaining at home (Arnold 2004). Even then, access to images for the majority of people did not come about until the 19th century and the invention of photography. So it was that early art historians often had to rely on what was written about particular objects, rather than knowing what they really looked like. Today’s technology allows the instant sharing of visual messages, and visits to virtual museums make non-verbal communication and discussion about particular images much more informed, even if the actual artworks are located in collections on the other side of the world.

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How contemporary is prehistoric art?

Defining visual vocabulary In the course of the book I will be looking at visual choices made by different cultures in the past and the present, suggesting that humans have used similar, though diverse, visual approaches at different times and in different places. For example, looking at several depictions of landscape (Figure 1.1) we can see different visual traditions in showing the world around us, hence, I will be using a visual vocabulary, as the way particular cultures use images in communicating ideas, concepts, social belongings and identities. The first example (Figure 1.1a) comes from Australia and reflects the dynamics of visual communication via rock art and present-day painting created by contemporary aboriginal artists. The ideas and transition from rock art to canvas were presented by Ken Mulvaney (2003) in his article “Transformations – rock art to canvas: representations of the totemic geography in Aboriginal Australia”. He argues that the use of acrylic paint shifted the focus of aboriginal totemic art from the rock art site into portable visualisation of location, as a ‘mythological narrative in place, by necessity the canvas and art-board become a plan or map’ (Mulvaney 2003: 297). This leads to a change in use from visual narrative as signifier of place, to visual narrative as place location in the landscape. While describing his painting (Figure 1.1a) Paddy Carlton says: This is my country right in the centre of the painting called Nyarlabarrbarm. The round white and brown circle represents a freshwater spring called Doogbariny; that is where the main Bullo River ends and the line going outwards is the river flowing out to the saltwater ocean. The yellow and white circle represents a billabong called Doorriny. The brown shape near the centre of the painting is a hill called Doowijem or Goorrbarloweny – Magpie Dreaming. (Carlton desertriversea)

FIGURE 1.1 a) Paddy Carlton, Nyarlabarrbarm (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Courtesy of the estate of Paddy Carlton and the Waringarri Aboriginal Arts); b) Giovanni-Battista Piranesi. Pyramid of Cestius, c. 1700s (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Piranesi, Wikipedia).

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The landscape as a place one visits was captured by Giovanni-Battista Piranesi (Figure 1.1b), whose etchings of ancient Rome added non-existent ruins to enhance the spirit of antiquity so important to those who bought them to take home as a reminder of their Grand Tour, and so essential to the education of 17th century English gentlemen. The way the landscapes shown here are visually represented depends not only on the type of environmental niche they illustrate, but also reflects the cultural background of the artists who created them and the viewer with whom they have been shared, since the comprehension of what we see and what it means relates to the cultural knowledge of both artist and viewer. Something as familiar as what we make of the patterns seen on the Moon is also influenced by culture. In Britain the most common understanding is a face (‘the Man on the Moon’), while in Japan people see a rabbit (Figure 1.2). This example illustrates the diversity of culturally based interpretations of the Moon’s surface, full of craters we observe from the Earth. The sculpture by Damien Hirst, the Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (Figure 1.3), created in 1991 and comprising a dead shark suspended in formaldehyde, and a small figurine of a horse made from mammoth ivory (48 mm wide, 25 mm high, 7 mm thick) dated to the Upper Palaeolithic (around 31,000 years ago) from the Vogelherd in Germany, can both be interpreted using similar modes of understanding, as shown in subsequent chapters. I suggest that contemporary visual art and archaeological interpretation are created and practiced in the same cultural, social and economic milieu. The people who create art objects or dig objects out of the ground and use these to create interpretations of the past are part of the same societies, the same shared cultures. Therefore, the concerns and ideas of one discipline can be found in the other, since people inhabit and reflect the culture and society in which they live. Both post-processual theoretical standpoints and the use of scientific method reflect the concerns and ideas of the world of which archaeology practitioners are a part. Living in the contemporary global world, we share broad and often implicit ways of understanding and communicating imagery through visual media. In a way, the

Different interpretations of ‘blobs’ on the Moon’s surface. a) image of the Moon as seen from Earth; b) rabbit on the Moon, as seen in Japanese culture; c) the ‘Man on the Moon’ as seen in European cultures.

FIGURE 1.2

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How contemporary is prehistoric art?

FIGURE 1.3 a) Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2020); b) unknown artist, horse, Vogelherd, c. 31,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę nsy).

principles of visual vocabulary, such as linear perspective or the way we look at a map, seem natural. We know that the size of an object further away in the distance appears smaller than one closer to us, as in the picture by Meyndert Hobbema, The Alley at Middelharnis (Figure 1.4), in which the trees closer to us are taller while those further away gradually become smaller. When we look at a modern map we know that North is always at the highest point or top of the picture, while South is lowest or at the bottom; the West is on the left while the East is on the right (Figure 1.5). Use of the Western visual tradition allows the viewer to employ the same approach to objects that have been created in different cultural and historical contexts, e.g. a shark suspended in formaldehyde or a bear from the earliest art we know, from Chauvet Cave dated to c. 32,000 years ago. Despite saying that, however, in the course of this book I will be using elements of nonWestern visual traditions, making use of visual ‘translation’, to enable us to see and understand different ways of projecting and creating images outside our own visual vocabulary.

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FIGURE 1.4 Meyndert Hobbema, The Alley at Middelharnis, 1689 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Hobbema. Wikipedia).

FIGURE 1.5 Map of the world showing the most common projection used in contemporary cartography – with the west to the left and the east to the right.

Visual art and the brain When talking about art we need to ask ourselves what visual art is, since without clarification of the concept we might be at a loss when discussing particular ideas or material culture. Art can be divided into two different but inseparable categories: first, art as visual expression is a part of the

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How contemporary is prehistoric art?

neurophysiological capacities of our bodies; and second, as a culturally moderated understanding of the world we inhabit which allows us to make sense of it, and to derive meaning from what we see and create. The neurophysiological aspect of seeing constrains the way we conceptualise the world around us, for example, to see in the far distance humans need to use binoculars, while birds can see well both at close proximity and far away. Humans can see a particular spectrum of colours while elks do not see orange – something that hunters make use of as they can see each other during hunting trips but their orange jackets are invisible to the elks they are hunting. This allows humans to experience and conceptualize the world around in a particular way: as philosopher Maurice MerleauPonty (2002: 82) wrote: ‘I am conscious of my body via the world’. We know what we see because we have prior culturally generated knowledge that we acquire mainly during childhood and also in later life through the process of learning. This allows us, for example, to make a distinction between a mug and a cup, or a wine glass and a water glass. We only see 10% of what surrounds us (Ratey 2002), at first concentrating on the edges to detect visual noise so our vision focuses on the most distinctive zones that create divisions between one set of areas and another, as we physiologically make sense of what we are seeing by distinguishing different parts of our surroundings. Figure 1.6 illustrates this: on the right side we have a single face against a clear background, while on the left there are many faces against busy backgrounds. We can immediately make sense of the picture on the right, not because it shows only one face, but because there is enough space around the face

FIGURE 1.6

Illustration showing visual noise versus visual silence.

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to allow us to focus on the image with no further interruption from the clear background. The visual information entering our brain is restricted by the visual silence around the image, with visual noise coming only from the image of the face itself. In the second picture, composed of a number of faces against a busy background, visual noise is much higher and our brains need some time to make sense of what we see. Each of us can recall instances when we looked at an image and felt that we needed to say to the person wanting to know what we thought about it: wait a minute, let me concentrate. In such instances our brains are bombarded with visual information, and need time to distinguish between what is important and what is not. This principle was used in interpreting prehistoric rock art from northern Russia dated to around 4,500 years ago (Janik et al. 2007). One of the rock art compositions consists of a number of different scenes of marine and terrestrial hunting, where the visual importance is placed on the scene of an elk hunt (Figure 1.7). The implications of this visual signification made us focus our research on this scene, to establish the concept of experiential art based on the experience of skiing and familiarity with local landscapes that were recreated in the carved rock surfaces. We see a winter scene with three hunters pursuing three elks, where hunters and elks leave traces of skis and hooves respectively in the snow. The concept of experiential art in prehistory as presented above (Janik et al. 2007) differs from what is usually

FIGURE 1.7 Unknown artist, Zalavruga rock art carvings, skiing and hunting scene, c. 4,500 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

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understood as the Experiential movement in contemporary art (Zics 2015). The difference lies in the distinction between the reception (in the former case) and production of art (in the latter). Contemporary Experiential art combines the results of research into the brain and modern technologies, including video and computer simulations to create imagery that arouses neurophysiological responses in the viewer by using ‘scientific findings to develop an aesthetic toolkit’ (Zics 2015). Our prehistoric artists at Zalavruga, however, used their own bodily experiences in the winter landscape to create three-dimensional imagery. Returning to the mechanics of seeing, what we see is light reflected from different objects as particular waves of different lengths entering our body via our eyes and being transmitted instantly to our brain via the optic nerve as a set of electrical stimulations. Due to the curvature of the eyeballs, the light waves entering the eye produce an upside-down image of what we see, which in turn is transformed in our brains into something the right way up. The process of how we see is very fast, and the time between looking at something and understanding what we see can be measured in nanoseconds. One of the best illustrations of how the brain works and what part of it is responsible for particular understandings of art is the book by Semir Zeki Inner Vision, An Exploration of Art and the Brain (1999a). The working of the brain is revealed by linking particular works of art and examples of how artists utilised human neurophysiological visual abilities. Subsequent publications (e.g. Livingstone 2002, Shimamura 2013) follow this path, introducing us to more artists and their work using this neuroaesthetic approach. Such an approach is not common in the study of prehistoric art, perhaps because those who study the brain do not know about the images created in the distant past, while archaeologists have not traditionally been engaged in looking at how neurophysiology can help us in interpreting the past. This approach has great potential; we are the same as earlier Modern Humans, and what distinguishes us from these ancestors is not our neurophysiological capacity, but rather the cultural constraints and choices that shape how these capacities are used in visual communication (Hodgson 2003, 2006, Janik 2012, 2013, 2014, Janik et al. 2007). In this book I relate past and contemporary art to generate a unified approach to the creation and consumption of visual art. Such an approach emphasises the contemporary understanding of the relationship between the neurophysiological capacities of humans and cultural influences that modify them. This approach goes beyond the understanding of visual art as proposed by Semir Zeki (1999a), John Onians (2010) and Colin Renfrew (2008). I suggest that the argument proposed by Zeki (1999a, 1999b) and others (e.g. Cela-Conde et al. 2011, Cupchik et al. 2009, Livingstone 2002, Nadal et al. 2008, Shimamura 2013), namely that the appreciation of visual art is linked with the way human neurophysiology works and influences how we see, needs to be understood when interpreting prehistoric visual culture. The connection between understanding visual art and the way it is organised by the brain was proposed long ago: Charles Le Brun, in his lecture to the French Academy of Painting and Sculpture in

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1668, suggested a relationship between artistic expression and the way the brain works (Changeux 2012). Later Gustav Fechner (1876), in his Primer of Aesthetics (Vorshule der Aesthetics) proposed a link between visual perception, aesthetic experience and artistic preference (Shimamura 2013). In the early 20th century the role of visual perception and aesthetic preferences were further explored by the founders of the Gestalt School of psychology. Their work was first presented in English translation in A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology (Ellis 1938), in which the authors explored the relationship between composition as a ‘whole’ and its elements. These ideas were developed further by Rudolf Arnheim (1974) in his ground-breaking works on visual perception, and in Ernst Gombrich’s (1960, 1979) work on the role of the principle components of composition. In recent years it has been possible to test their ideas, and prove them to be correct, due to the development of diagnostic techniques such as MRI (magnetic resonance imagining) or CT (computerized tomography) brain scans. I go further in my interpretation of visual art and place artistic capacities in the cultural context where visual imagery is created and consumed within particular social, ritual and symbolic circumstances. Onians (2010) sees the development of the neurophysiological abilities of Homo sapiens as being influenced by our engagement with the world around us, resulting in the creation of the first visual art in which animals were depicted as objects of admiration, with depictions of human form only coming later, as people became increasingly interested in their fellow humans. Onians argues that the ‘admiration’ of animals led to the first realistic depictions, such as the oldest known rock art drawings in Chauvet Cave, dated to between 32,000 and 26,000 years ago, with imagery becoming stylized only later. It is difficult to support this argument because the stylisation of the rhinos’ ears and hooves is now recognized, leading archaeologists to define a Chauvet style of imagery (Clottes 2003) (Figure 1.8). Furthermore, Onians’s argument that the reason for putting images on cave walls was to replicate bears’ scratchings, a response to the function of mirror neurons, is questionable since only very few cave walls that have bear scratchings have been decorated, and also because not only bears were depicted in those caves.

FIGURE 1.8 Unknown artist, Chauvet Cave, fragment of the Great Panel, depictions of rhino, with Chauvet style hooves and ears, between c. 32,000 and 26,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Rhinos, Chauvet Cave. Wikipedia).

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Onians observes that large herbivores became extinct in Europe around 22,000 years ago, at around the same time as Venus figurines were being created representing apparently very overweight women, while in Japan around 10,000 years ago, where the diet was based on small mammals, fish and birds, figurines were also being created, but not of large women. He proposes that what the artists saw led to the creation of neural networks ‘that gave them a special interest in them and neural chemistry that meant looking at them gave them particular pleasure’ (Onians 2010: 7). Such assumptions look rather simplistic when he equates pleasure with large mammals and large women. Such an argument denies the historical uniqueness of particular communities as well as cultural influence in the creative process of visual imagery and implies that, for instance, all fishermen from the tropical zones of the world should produce similar art, which we know is not the case. Renfrew (2008) argues that we can talk about complex human behaviour that can be compared to our own from around 10,000 years ago, but not from around 60,000 years ago, when the Homo sapiens genome was established. His approach is based on the assumption that via engagement with the material world we become what we are today: specifically, engagement with materials that embody values given to them by communities as well as through religious practices. He argues that due to sedentism, agriculture, wealth accumulation and the use of monetary currencies, our brains have been modified by developing particular neural networks in childhood. Renfrew discusses Upper Palaeolithic art, in particular Franco-Cantabrian cave art and western European Venus figurines, but he does not see them as valuable evidence to support complex human behaviour similar to ours prior to 10,000 years ago. I will challenge this assumption throughout this book, and in Chapter 5 I present a picture of highly complex and sophisticated symbolic behaviour from over 20,000 years ago that can be found in religious practices from today’s world. Further, Renfrew’s understanding of art and the art object is deeply rooted in traditional Western art history: for him visual art and communication are illustrations of human creative achievements, rather than recognising the active role of material culture. This role is now widely accepted in contemporary archaeological interpretation, informed by post-colonial critiques within archaeology which question our own values through engagement with ‘other’ cultural norms, notably those influenced by feminism and queer theory. Before considering prehistoric and contemporary art in detail, however, I will concentrate in the next part of this chapter on looking at human neurophysiology as part of neuroaesthetics, focusing on the question of how contemporary is prehistoric art.

Neurophysiology This part of the chapter describes and illustrates the human neurophysiological capacities for seeing and creating imagery in relation to the statement we encountered above: ‘I am conscious of my body via the world’ (Merleau-Ponty

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2002: 82). We see the world in particular ways which allow us to respond in particular ways. Everything we do is defined by our neurophysiological capacities. As presented in later chapters, these capacities are used or ignored by humans in the process of ‘being in the world’. Here I am preparing the ground for later chapters by introducing neurophysiological capacities that allow us to see and create the world around us in particular ways. I have chosen to do this as a distinct part of this chapter because the material is most likely unfamiliar to the majority of readers, and to prepare the background for the discussion of how visual communication is embedded in the cultural contexts of imagery creation and appropriation.

The brain: the way we see The brain is the centre of information processing that allows us to see, and make sense (or not) of what we see. It relies on light stimuli constantly entering our eyes, and at the same time interprets visual information on the basis of already accumulated knowledge derived from our experiencing and moderating the world of which we are part. The human brain is composed of three general structures, as described by John Ratey (2002: 22): the hind-brain at the top of our spinal cord, which controls sensation and movement of the muscles of our face and throat; the mid brain, farther into the centre of the head, which deals with some movement of the eyes and some rudimentary hearing and vision; and the forebrain, which achieves its most glorious development in human beings and which contains cerebral matter fibres connecting neurons of the cortex with each other and with other neurons, as well as those areas deep in the centre of the brain that coordinate automatic sensory and motor functions. Each brain is unique due to the individual experiences of each particular person that alter and shape their brain throughout life. The brain contains a number of areas related in particular to visual information. Current understanding of the visual areas of the brain proposes that there are few locations associated specifically with the sphere of vision and constitute the part of the brain called the cerebral visual cortex (Figure 1.9). The main part is the primary visual cortex V1 surrounded by the V2 area. The visual information from these two regions is distributed to more specialised areas that relate to particular aspects of visual recognition, V3, V3a, V4, V5, V5a, as well as to facial and object recognition. Acknowledging the role of personal experiences is essential to understanding the processes that make sense of establishing what we see, personal experiences form a kind of ‘database’ that allows us to compare and make intelligible clues about what we see or recognize when we do not yet know what we are seeing.

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Visual areas of the brain (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Cortex functional areas. Wikimedia).

FIGURE 1.9

Since the V1 area is where visual information first enters the brain, it does not have any comparative capacity. The information is sent to other visual areas for the purpose of establishing clues about shapes, colours and other characteristics of the seen image (Wagemans et al. 2012a). However, area V1 is vital in the process of seeing and if it is damaged or destroyed it results in blindness. By researching people with malfunctioning of the brain and linking this to particular medical conditions, the areas responsible for specific information have been identified; the colour path consists of cells in V1, the specialised cells in V2 and V4, together with strong stations in the temporal lobe. The motion pathway similarly consists of specialised motion detecting cells in V1 and in V2, and the specialised areas V5, together with the further motion specialised areas surrounding it. (Zeki 1999a: 72) Seeing, however, does not imply understanding and that is why some people with particular damage to the visual areas in their brains can see but not understand what they see. A striking example of such occurrence is the person suffering from agnosia, who could draw St Paul’s Cathedral but could not recognize it (Zeki 1999a: 73–74). He was able to recognize the lines he created in the very accurate drawing of the cathedral, their directions and angles but not the picture of St Paul’s per se. Reaching beyond the medical definition of suffering from agnosia we need to go beyond the medical definition of agnosia and use Gestalt theories of visual perception to understand the relationship between the individual elements of an image and the whole. The whole can be achieved by the elements representing something different, but the results of putting those elements together creates an independent visual entity (Palmer 2002: 255, Wagemans et al. 2012a, 2012b). The same selection

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of individual visual elements can be re-ordered to create various composite images. An example is the head of the mammoth from Rouffignac Cave dated to around 17,000 years ago (Figure 1.10). The mammoth was drawn by fingers in a process called fluting, the very soft surface of the cave wall being used as a ‘canvas’ by the prehistoric artists who, created a number of lines using one or more fingers. Seeing the mammoth is achieved by visual information located in primary visual cortex V1 being ‘sent’ to other areas of the brain. The area responsible for categorising colour is V4, and motion V5, and so by using colour or motion artists trigger responses in these areas in the viewers’ brains and evoke particular reactions. Furthermore, the areas of the brain linked to memory and past experiences are activated: ‘visual associate cortex, the parietal cortex and the prefrontal – all higher cognitive processing centres of the brain’ (Ratey 2002: 107), making sense of and attaching meaning to what we see. I do not postulate that prehistoric or contemporary artists knew or know what parts of the brain are activated by particular images, but rather that they implicitly explore those relations by creating particular images, which in turn create more or less successful artists, depending on how he or she makes us respond to the produced image. Looking at particular correlations between parts of the brain and specific characteristics of images, and following Zeki’s (1999a) and Livingstone’s (2002) examples as well as introducing other examples assembled in the process of

Unknown artist, Rouffignac Cave, Patriarch, c. 17,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Patriarch, Rouffignac Cave. grottederouffignac).

FIGURE 1.10

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writing this book, I propose some new characteristics for consideration. I focus here on human neurophysiological capacities of seeing, such as colour, line, face, embodiment, motion/movement and abstract depictions. All of these form part of contemporary and prehistoric art, where artists used their skill and intentionality in accessing human cognitive abilities in nonverbal communication through visual images. The examples discussed will implicitly and explicitly relate to the visual art presented in the following chapters. The way we see is also related to two pathways along which visual information travels and generates understanding of what we see, as shown in Figure 1.11. They start in the area of V1 from where the ventral pathway travels to V4 and the temporal cortex, and deals with the fundamental question of ‘what’ we see: faces, objects and colours. The second dorsal pathway travels to V5 and the parietal cortex and is responsible for the special location, ‘where’: movement, the organisation of space and the separation between objects and their background (Changeux 2012, Goodale and Milner 1992, Milner and Goodale 2008, Shimamura 2013). As pointed out by Shimamura (2013), the recent discovery of the posterior parietal cortex allows us to understand the integrated role of both pathways that meet in this part of the brain, making sense from the regions responsible for auditory and haptic information, which in turn allow us to plan our actions while at the same time interpreting the world around us.

Seeing colour While this book is printed in black and white, colour is one of the elements of seeing that, like the construction of the composition (Chapter 3) is vital in grabbing our attention and making us see at once the information coded in colour

The dorsal (stripes) and ventral (dots) streams both begin from the visual cortex (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Two-streams hypothesis. Wikipedia).

FIGURE 1.11

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(Chapter 4). It is intrinsic to seeing and communicating via seeing, and equally to the process of the creation and appreciation of the visual. The use of colour is now fully recognized as part of the cultural assemblage utilized by our ancestors Homo heidelbergensis, Homo rhodensisiensis and Homo helmei around 500,000 years ago, predating the appearance of Homo sapiens by several hundred thousand years (Barham 2002, Bednarik 2003, McBrearty and Brooks 2000). The first object identified as a figurine, a representation of the human figure, dates to this period (e.g. Bednarik 2003, Morris-Kay 2010). This remarkable object was discovered in 2001 during excavations carried out by an international team, directed by Lutz Fiedler, in Morocco near the town of Tan Tan (Figure 1.12). The figurine was found in archaeological layers dated to the Middle Acheulean period – 500,000 to 300,000 years ago, and is associated with a number of objects most likely created and used by Homo heidelbergensis, including hand-axes, cleavers and flakes. At first glance the figurine is an unassuming piece of quartzite measuring 5.8 cm in length and 2.6 cm in width. But if we look more closely we see that it was intentionally modified to resemble a standing figure, by enhancing through carving existing natural grooves in the stone. What is most remarkable for me about this object, however, is the use of colour. Some people might question the intentionality involved in modifying the stone, namely simple enhancement of natural grooves in its surface, rather than any more obvious ‘sculpting’, such as removing the outer surface (Bednarik 2003). The use of

Unknown artist, Tan Tan, human shape figurine, between c. 500,000 and 300,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Bednarik 2003).

FIGURE 1.12

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colour, however, clearly signifies the intentionality of the artist, marking this object out as something distinctive, something to be seen, visually separated from other objects. The use of waxy ‘brilliant red’ pigment, as noted by Robert Bednarik (2003), immediately made the figurine stand out visually and recognisably based on the human form. Black and white pigments were also applied. The combination of shape and colour make this an object of exceptional significance as the first intentionally created sculpture, with colour an integral part of the meaning that the figurine carried for its creator and other members of the community. It plays a very important role in the story of our species, Homo sapiens, and provides a vivid link to our distant artistic ancestors. When looking at any images, one of the most arresting characteristics we identify is colour. Seeing colour depends on the light entering our brains via the retina: light itself is not constant but varies, and that is what determines what and how we see. Colour is light of different waveband lengths that is first assessed in the eye. While objects and their surroundings are illuminated by a source of light such as the sun or an electric light bulb, the light itself is reflected from objects as photons charged with particular electromagnetic energy that vibrates in specific frequencies, generating the distinction between specific surfaces, which we see as different colours. Light reflected from objects does not equal light illuminating the objects since numerous objects absorb it in different ways, creating the variety of colours we see. As humans, we see by responding to wavelengths between c. 4000–7000 nanometers (nm) where one nanometre is one billionth of a metre. The whole spectrum of light/wavelengths can be seen by any of us during the natural phenomenon of a rainbow, when we see semicircular curved lines of different colours connected as one band. Wavelengths outside 4000–7000 nm have to be converted by specially constructed implements for us to see, such as x-ray or ultraviolet photography (Palmer 2002). Furthermore, colour is also determined by the physiology of the eye itself, which allows light to enter the brain through the retina’s photoreceptive cells. Cones are cells that sense the wavelength determining the colours we see, and each of us has around six million of them. There are three types of cones in the human eye responsible for three types of wavelength and corresponding to the perception of three colours. Yet they differ in terms of how much particular stimuli enter the visual areas of the brain; the proportion is 1:5:10 (Palmer 2002: 112, fig.3.2.13). The one belongs to short (S) wavelengths type cone, focusing on blue; medium (M) wavelengths type cones, focusing on green; while 10 belongs to long (L) wavelengths, focusing on red. The L cone peaks at 560 nm and responds to equivalent wavelengths of 500–700 nm, the M cone peaks at 530 nm and responds to 450–630 nm, while the S cone peaks at 440 and responds to 400–500 nm wavelengths. The striking thing is that they overlap. In particular the wavelengths covered by L (red) and the M (green) cones overlap, and they also both peak very closely. This closeness is related to colour blindness, which results in some people, (usually men) not being able to distinguish between red and green (Livingstone 2002, Palmer 2002). This closeness also produces the best response in human beings to the ratio between the wavelength of light controlled by the red and green cones, ‘the yellow-to-red

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range of light spectrum’ (Livingstone 2002: 27), the colour range first intentionally used by early humans around 300,000 years ago (Barham 2002, McBrearty and Brooks 2000, Morris-Kay 2010). The result of such physiological properties is associated with the way we distinguish between colours as combinations of light waves of varied lengths. For example, the colour white is ‘a mixture of all wavelengths of visible light, or from a combination of appropriate quantities of red and cyan (a greenish blue) yellow and blue green, purple, or many other mixtures of appropriate light’ (Livingstone 2002: 30). The ratio between the light spectrum determines how well we distinguish between colours; the further apart on the rainbow, the better they can be differentiated. The printing of this book used the principle of two contrasting colours (black and white) which provides us with the understanding of how best to create pigment where one colour (white) reflects light well, while the other (black) does not, thus trapping light. This creates the perfect distinction between waves of various lengths that enter our eyes, in turn producing the visible distinction between the white page and the black printed text or illustrations (Lu and Sperling 2005). Colour also depends on other properties including: hue, saturation and lightness, which are essential to the way we categorize what we see and what colours we ascribe to particular visual experiences (Livingstone 2002, Lu and Sperling 2005, Palmer 2002). While the cones are linked in distinguishing colour, the second photoreceptors located in our eyes are rods, of which each of us has around twelve million. They are responsible for defining the luminescence of light, understood as the brightness/lightness of light, which determines how we see colour in darkness. To visualise this, it is best to look at old films or photographs made in black and white. We can see how the lightness plays a role in seeing particular objects, not because they originally are ‘white’ but because they are seen as bright on the photograph. Rods do not follow the cones’ ratio of responding 1=S:5=M:10=L wavelengths in allowing particular light to enter our brain. Instead they favour short wavelengths, allowing greater entry of light in the spectrum of blue (S) and green (M), which in practice means that we see blue better than red in the dark. This is linked with the Purkinje shift that explains why red cherries will be better seen during the day than the blue bowl they lie in, while in the dark the blue bowl will be better seen than the red cherries (Livingstone 2002: 43). The use of colours and their ‘power’ in nonverbal communication is created by overlapping our physiological abilities with the meaning that will trigger the neurological responses when we react to it. Cultural codes, memories and acts of performing are part of this response: in many Western societies white is the colour of the bride, while black is the colour for mourners at a funeral (Gage 2006, Lackoff and Johnson 1999, Shimamura 2013, Zarkadi and Schnall 2013).

Seeing line While lines are the primary visual indicators of shape and direction of viewing, they are often not noticed. The importance of lines is not pronounced in visual

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communication, since a line is not only seen in a conventional sense as a marked unbroken distance leading from one point to the other, but can also be a composition of short strokes or points that indicate continuity of direction. It is rare for us to see lines per se because they are very often part of the composition comprising the image. This can be seen in all the illustrations in this book in the ways lines create and emphasize shape, image and movement. Recent research by Sarah Evans (2016) into the geometric engravings from the Magdalenian period dated to between 17,000 and 12,000 years ago in western Europe suggests that the way bone and antler were carved and how the geometric designs were constructed, along with their distribution on the carved surfaces, indicates how they were used as the first form of the non-verbal communication akin to writing. Evans proposes that lines are the most important elements in indicating communication between people, and messages between communities and regions. The more elaborate the geometric compositions, the more regional their use, while a ‘global’ network of communication, in which the type of design was restricted and composed only of transverse lines, was found in all regions she investigated, i.e. in the Dordogne and the Pyrenees in France, and in northern Spain. This use of lines in a set of geometrical engravings in the visual vocabulary of late Palaeolithic Europe is, for Evans, an indication of the way people communicated across large distances without the spoken word, through recognising combinations or associations of particular lines and the messages and meanings they carried. When looking, we concentrate on one particular point or area, the centre of the gaze that is seen as a clear and focused image. The other parts of what we look at are linked with peripheral vision, which allows us to create a context for what we see. The gaze is affected by various elements that allow us to focus and make sense of what we see. These elements include lines or outlines of the image that allow us to distinguish between particular elements of the overall image. The areas of the brain responsible for making sense of these elements are V1 + V2 + V3. Additionally, what we see also depends on the angle at which the lines meet or cross each other. This is visually most significant when it happens at 30°, the area that involves a further part of the brain, V4 (Zeki 1999a). The regions of the brain including the parietal, prontoparietal, temporo-occipitoparietal, interoparetal, optical thalamic, and basal ganglia are all involved in determining different angles of the lines (Calamia et al. 2011, Charras and Lupiáñez 2010, Treccani and Cubelli 2011, Urbanski and Bartolomeo 2008). The work of contemporary British artists comes to mind here, where lines and their orientations are used in communicating with the audience, as in the work of Andy Goldsworthy, who uses ice as his artistic medium in the sculptures, Icicle star, 1987. The photo on the Art Story web page gives instant access to the ice sculpture despite the ephemeral nature of the material from which it was made. A click of the computer mouse allows us to see a sculpture which does not exist anymore, but rather the record of which is seen on the screen stimulating various areas of our brain, focusing on the regions responsible for seeing lines since the sculpture

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comprizes of a series of lines converging in the centre. A similar principle by a contemporary artist of using lines can be seen in the installation Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) by Cornelia Parker. Exhibited at the Tate Modern, it can be accessed via the web instantly without going to London. It is an installation using the remains of a shed that had been expertly exploded by the Royal Engineers. What was left was collected and reconstructed in 3D by the artist (Figure 1.13). It looks like an enormous number of planks and a window frame suspended in the air, with light emanating from within as if exploding the shadows of shapes across the walls, ceiling and floor. It is, in one sense, a jumble of lines created by shadows and mostly wooden debris suspended from the ceiling, a spectacular optical feast communicating on the basis of the visual recognition of lines. The special potency of lines and their orientation cannot be underestimated: some lines that create a 30° angle in other contexts can be seen as chevrons, decorations frequently used in prehistoric imagery, stimulating an additional region, the V3 area of the brain. Furthermore, the use of horizontal lines or orientations of lines, as in Figure 2.6 where the horizontal line demarcates between land and air, is also allocated to specific locations in the brain, stimulating the retinal ganglion cells, thalamic and visual cortical cells (Charras and Lupiáñez 2010, Howe and Purves 2005, Livingstone 2002: 27).

Cornelia Parker, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1991 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London).

FIGURE 1.13

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Various brain regions are stimulated when looking at abstract pictures by Mondrian, Malevich or Hartung (Figure 1.14a) consisting of lines assembled into non-figurative designs, just as when looking at markings on the piece of ochre (Figure 1.14b), one of the earliest substances used as a pigment, from Blombos Cave around one hundred thousand years ago. This last example illustrates a further neurophysiological aspect of seeing lines, used by artists to focus the viewer’s attention. As in Goldsworthy’s Icicle star, the lines on the Blombos Cave ochre piece, dated to over 75,000 years ago (Figure 1.14b), are bisected, creating X-shaped configurations, which focus our gaze at the X point where the lines meet (Charras and Lupiáñez 2010). This shows that both artists used this neurophysiological capacity of being human in the way they direct our attention. Lines are often more than simple linear elements. As postulated by Gestalt theory they are essential to our comprehension of the overall image, and only have an independent existence when we take the overall image apart, e.g. the shape of the face can be detected from configurations of different lines (Busigny et al. 2010, Koenderink et al. 2012, Kubilius et al. 2011, Rossion 2013, Wagemans et al. 2008). We do not see the lines but we see the image of which the lines are a part. This principle has been used in creating large numbers of images within prehistoric art, including possibly the rarest depiction, namely the image of a bird in Chauvet Cave (Figure 1.15). By making it from a number of lines, without filling the interior of the outline with colours and textures, the prehistoric artist has created the image of an owl. Lines are here used as a framework

a) H. Hartung, Ohne Titel, 1961 (sketch made by A. Szczę sny after: Hans Hartung © Hans Hartung/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019); b) unknown artist, Blombos Cave, fragment of engraved ochre, between c. 100,000 and 75,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Engraved ochre, Blombos Cave. Wikipedia).

FIGURE 1.14

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Unknown artist, Chauvet Cave, an owl, between c. 32,000 and 26,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Owl, Chauvet Cave. Wikipedia).

FIGURE 1.15

for the shape and as a visual notification of the principle characteristics of an owl. As in the picture of the mammoth from Chauvet Cave from the same period (Figure 1.10), the owl was drawn on the soft wall of the cave. In this case, however, the surface was first prepared by scraping, and the bird image then carved with the use of a tool. In Franco-Cantabrian art, the outline is the key in establishing the shape of the animals. In this way the viewer’s attention is concentrated on the image, since visual silence and noise is well distinguished. What we see here is prehistoric artists reaching their audiences by the use of the line as one of the artistic media of communication (Figures 1.8, 1.16).

Seeing the face At the site of La Marche (Vienne) in France, lines are used to depict a series of remarkable faces (Figure 1.17). Recognising the face is a further aspect in our neurophysiological propensity for art. The face is often associated with portraiture, leaving us with an image of a person who may be long gone but who continues to be present through the depiction of their face. In general we know very few faces of our prehistoric ancestors and the majority of them come from the La Marche rock shelter, dated to the Magdalenian Period over 14,000 years ago (Bahn 1998, Bahn and Vertut 1997). Depictions of human faces, along with

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human and animal silhouettes, were scratched on some 1,512 stone slabs and slab pieces weighing four tons in total. The size of the slabs varies from very large to just a few cementers. After refitting some of the fragments together, the overall number of slabs was 1,268. The human and animal depictions overlap each other, often creating a tangle of lines and sequences of superimposition that are difficult to decipher. Among the more than 100 well defined human images, three of the faces/heads are seen en face, and the remaining depictions are of faces/heads and human bodies seen in 90° silhouette profile. Most of the portraits look realistic as if representing real persons (Figure 1.16). The creation of depictions from such an angle indicates that the most probable scenario was that they were produced by someone other than the owner of the face. It would be very difficult for the artists to draw their own faces as 90° silhouettes, as this would require at least two reflective surfaces or mirrors used at once, reflecting the profile of the face back to the artist. Depicting one’s own face at the en face angle, on the other hand, was possible using a simple reflection in water. The creation of such a large number of images from the 90° angle profile indicates a cultural desire or need to signify individuals through the medium of portraiture. Are we for the first time witnessing the cult of the individual who, via his or her achievements, was immortalized on the La Marche slabs? Or are they faces of random individuals whose friends and loved ones scratched their images on the slabs to keep them alive forever. One of the essential neurophysiological abilities in personal interactions between people, as well as participation in the social life of any community, is our ability to recognize faces and the emotional potency they carry; e.g. we can recognize if someone is sad or happy, giving us an indication of the person’s mood (Figure 1.18). In modern Western society, recognition of the individual and the signification of the person through portraiture is a reflection of the way these societies emphasize the role of particular individuals in cultural, social or economic spheres. While we take this ability for granted, in the past it was used in different ways – as will be shown in Chapters 5 and 6 – contradicting how we traditionally understand portraiture in art history.

Unknown artist/s, La Marche (Vienne), silhouettes of faces, c. 14,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Stéphane 1943).

FIGURE 1.16

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Humans can distinguish the identity of one person from another by looking at individual faces. Here we see the face of Queen Elizabeth I (Figure 1.17a), in a portrait created by an unknown artist. The second face is part of a Joˉ mon figurine (Figure 1.17b), although we do not know the identity of the individual or indeed if it is a representation of a particular person. The face is very expressive with an open mouth as if singing or shouting, and possibly tattooed lips. We can also differentiate between emotional expressions by looking at faces. Emotional potency captured by facial expression when used in the visual arts gives us the unique ability of relating on an emotional level to the images, which in turn forces us to respond to the implicit or explicit intentionality of the artist. We cannot overestimate the importance of such abilities in visual communication, nor the intentionality of the artists in its use. I return to this theme in Chapter 6 when discussing portraiture and how this ability has been manipulated in accordance with cultural norms. James Haxby summarises how the brain deals with facial recognition: The core of the human neural system for face perception consists of three bilateral regions in occipitotemporal visual extrastriate cortex. Those regions are in the inferior occipital gyri, the lateral fusiform gyrus, and the superior temporal sulcus. These regions are presumed to perform the visual analysis of faces and appear to participate differently in different types of face perception. The region in the lateral fusiform gyrus appears to be involved more in the representation of identity, whereas the region in superior temporal sulcus appears to be

a) unknown artist, Elizabeth I, the ‘Darnley Portrait’ of Elizabeth I c. 1575, fragment (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Elizabeth I, the Darnley Portrait. Wikipedia); b) unknown artist, Kazahari I, fragment of human figurine, between c. 3,500 and 3,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

FIGURE 1.17

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involved more in representation of changeable aspects of faces. The anatomical location of the region in the inferior occipital gyri suggests that it may provide input to both the lateral fusiform and superior temporal sulcal regions. Additional regions in other parts of the brain also participate in face perception insofar as they are recruited to process of significance of information gleaned from faces. For example, lip-reading elicits activity in regions that are associated with auditory processing of speech sounds. Similarly, the perception of facial expression elicits activity in limbic regions that are associated with processing emotion. (Haxby et al. 2000: 223) These capacities are understood to be universal to those who can see (Ekman 1993, Ekman and Friesen 1978). It also has been argued that blind people without early visual experiences can recognize facial expression via the haptic experience of touch (Kitada et al. 2013). By moving the muscles of our face, we can create over 40 different expressions (Kitada et al. 2013), which allows us to communicate the emotional and physiological state of our mind and body. Some authors put forward four emotional conditions that can be instantly visually recognized without any need for verbal communication: anger, fear, joy/ happiness, and sadness (Ratey 2002: 232). Andrew Calder (Calder et al. 2001, 1996) talks about six by adding two more to Ratey’s list: disgust and surprise. It has been proposed that particular areas of the brain’s neural network are involved in the facial perception of emotions: the amygdale in the recognition of fear (Calder et al. 2001); the insula and basal ganglia in the recognition of disgust (Calder et al. 2000); the amygdale in the recognition of anger (Beaver et al. 2008); and the left prefrontal cortex, in particular the front tip of the cingulated gyrus, is involved in the recognition of sadness (Ratey 2002: 241). In the recognition of joy/happiness the hypothalamus, septum and nucleus accumbens are all activated (Ratey 2002: 244). However, we have to remember that these areas are related to the limbic system, which is accountable, among other functions, for emotional reactions. This neurophysiological capacity was not used in visual art for millennia, responding to cultural and social codes and needs. The development of portraiture as representations of a face appears in antiquity rather than prehistory in Europe, although it can perhaps be found in the masks of Joˉ mon Japan, several thousand years ago.

Seeing the body Seeing and understanding emotional expression are not only linked with seeing a face, but also with the way the body reinforces or negates such messages by creating dynamic information where the motion of the body indicates a particular action (App et al. 2012, Grosbras et al. 2012). Research in this area not only suggests a link between bodily appearance and facial expression, but also puts forward the idea that there is a stronger link between body and action, rather than face and

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action. This idea will be developed in Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 when we discuss portraiture. The representation of the human body in art is linked with our neurophysiological capacity of referring to the self: During third-person perspective simulation, one needs especially to be aware of who the self is, in order to be able to imagine another person with the same neural recourses as the self. So as not consciously to confuse third-person simulation with first-person simulation, regions that are critical for body schema or corporeal awareness be highly recruited. (Ruby and Decety 2001: 548) The first time we encounter depictions of the human body is the Tan Tan figurine (Figure 1.12), half a million years ago, as already discussed. The prehistoric representation of the human form takes a dramatic turn with the appearance of the female figurines of Palaeolithic Europe made, unlike Tan Tan, by fully modern humans. I will deal with these so-called Venus figurines in Chapter 5. Sometime before these striking objects were made in, what is now Russia, however, a somewhat different tradition of depicting human and animal forms is found in the Czech Republic between 29,000 and 24,000 years ago (Verpoote 2001). Made of a variety of materials, these figurines were distinctive in a number of ways. Ten per cent were made by mixing local silt loam with water, giving the substance the same flexibility as if using clay, e.g. the figurine from Dolní Věstonice (11.5 cm) (Figure 1.19). This is the first time this medium, so important in later periods, was used to create art, or indeed anything else. This initial use of ceramics disappears with the end of the Pavlovian culture (29,000–24,000 years ago) and the tradition of making ceramic figurines ends, as if the inhabitants of the sites where figurines are found no longer had a need for this form of symbolic expression. The hiatus in the use of clay lasts for around 20,000 years, after which ceramics were re-introduced from the south by communities who cultivated plants and used domesticated animals. The figurines found at Pavlovian sites are mostly heavily fragmented and are associated with layers of ash, burned bone and charcoal (Klíma 1963, 1972, 1973, 1981, 1983), most likely the places in settlements where people made fire. The figurines were exposed to temperatures between 500 and 800°C. The oxygen available during firing varied, giving the figurine fragments a spectrum of colours from reddish brown to blackish grey. Of the recovered fragments 99% show ‘fracture’ breakages at the points where the different parts were attached, for example legs to torso. This means that they were not fully dried before being put into the fire (Soffer and Vandiver 1994, 1997, 2005, Verpoote 2001). The implications of this archaeological understanding of the process of figurine-making are very interesting for ideas about how and for what they were made. First, they were made from local materials, silt loam and water, and were put in the fire while still not fully dry (Figure 1.18). There is no evidence for post-firing handling or modification of the figurines’ surface. It seems that they

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FIGURE 1.18 Unknown artist, Dolní Věstonice female figurine, between c. 29,000 and 24,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

stayed in the fire and were only taken from the ashes thousands of years later by archaeologists. It therefore appears that they were produced so that they could fragment in the firing process. I suggest that what was equally important is that these fragmented anthropomorphic bodies remained at the settlements with the community members who were performing everyday activities, but whose symbolic visual expression was ‘secured’ in the firing performance. We can argue for the need for contextual approaches to the metaphors that the anthropomorphic figurines embodied and their meanings but, as in contemporary art, we can see here the neurophysiological capacities the artist used to visually communicate, even if for a relatively short period of time, as in the case of the Pavlovian artists. The brain areas responsible for such recognition are ‘the right inferior parietal lobe and the precuneus’ (Ruby and Decety 2001: 548). Arzy and colleagues (2006a) suggest the temporoparietal junction is responsible for such visualising oneself as another body by being ‘involved in self-processing, selfother distinction, the integration of multisensory body-related information, and other illusory own-body perceptions’ (Arzy et al. 2006a: 287). One’s own body as a corporal loci is fundamental in defining self and is linked to the temporoparietal junction as a centre of ‘self-processing and multisensory

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integration of body-related information; and the extrastriate body area (EBA), which responds selectively to human bodies and body parts’ (Arzy et al. 2006b: 8074). Through focusing on one’s own body and self, the understanding of others is produced. The visualisation of self moves the image from an egocentric to an allocentric perspective (Galati et al. 2010, Sudo et al. 2012) (Figure 1.20). Let us look at two further contrasting images (Figure 1.19). The image on the left is of an iron sculpture of Antony Gormley’s body created by first making a plaster cast of his body and then casting a replica in iron (Figure 1.19a). The sculpture on the right is a self-sculpture, 11 cm tall carved by an unknown woman of her own body around 25,000 years ago (Figure 1.19b). We see a torso with spindly arms resting on her breasts. The head is carved, but there is no face and the feet are missing. In such a context the corporality of one’s own body becomes a reference point for the visualisation, representation and understanding of another: ‘the use of the term embodiment to refer to the capacity to understand or re-represent the states of others by linking them to states related to one’s own body, either at the embodiment level directly, or via a representation of one’s own body at the embodiment level’ (Candidi et al. 2012: 110).

FIGURE 1.19 a) Antony Gormley, UNTITLED [FOR FRANCIS], 1986, Lead, fibreglass and plaster, 188 x 119 x 34 cm, Tate Collection, London, England (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: © the artist temp image); b) unknown artist, Willendorf, female figurine, c. 2,500 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

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The body itself, however, is not an undistinguishable whole. It is composed of different parts including the head, torso, legs and hands, understanding of which is linked with the extrastriate area of the brain (Amoruso et al. 2011, Arzy et al. 2006b, Astafiev et al. 2004). By looking at fragments of our own or other’s bodies we can make sense of the body as whole. Moreover, the motor capacities, or how we move, provide us with additional understanding that allows us to construct the distinction between body parts and the corporeality of self-differentiated from others. Such a capacity is related to the anterior insula and the occipital cortex bilaterally, as an area of the brain involved in the neural network responsible for understanding self and the other (Ferri et al. 2012). This neurophysiological capacity has been explored by Jim Bond, a number of whose kinetic sculptures were constructed as body parts in motion that represent the whole, either by self assembly or by the viewer moving around the sculpture to reach the viewing station where all disconnected elements are visually aligned into one human body. Bond’s sculptures are one of the best examples in neuroaesthetics of bringing together the processes of embodiment and fragmentation (Figure 1.20). Similarly, these capacities have been explored in prehistoric art from the earliest period of figurine production over 35,000 years ago in Palaeolithic Europe. In later periods, fisher-gatherer-hunters of prehistoric Japan (from around 6,000 to about 2,000 years ago) constructed their clay sculptures in such a way that fragmentation of the body was easy and particular body parts could be well distinguished (Bausch 2010, Kaner 2010, Kobayashi 2004). Such archaeological case studies will be explored further in Chapter 5.

Seeing motion Motion in visual communication is often understated and, if explored beyond what we see, can generate most interesting, innovative and often surprising outcomes, as shown in Chapter 3. Our expectations of what we see and explicitly

Jim Bond, Anamorphic Man, 2009, photography by John Coombes (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Courtesy of the artist. © Jim Bond).

FIGURE 1.20

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understand do not contradict our neurophysiological abilities. Without the technology of film, action is not seen in the movement, and movement is not seen in action in traditional paintings and carvings. Analysing how we react to imagery with the understanding of experiences of being in the world, we participate in the image with unprecedented clarity. This allows us to start interpreting contemporary and past art as active participants in story-telling and building the narrative. By looking at a static picture that repeats itself, we get the idea of movement. In an example from prehistoric rock art from northern Russia, we can see depictions of movements dated to over 4,500 years ago, without any movement actually taking place (Janik 2018, Janik et al. 2007). By following the ski tracks and elk hoof prints, we see humans and animals moving from the top and left towards the right. We see the hunters pursuing and killing the animals as a sequence of events and actions in time and space. This led me to interpret movement as part of visual narrative, today linked with film technology as discussed in Chapter 3. This is only possible because humans possess specific neurophysiological characteristics that give us unique capacities to represent and perceive movement in time and space while creating and viewing visual narrative (Figure 1.21).

FIGURE 1.21 Unknown artist, Zalavruga rock art carvings, skiing and hunting scene, c. 4,500 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

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The recognition of motion is associated with region M1 (primary motor cortex) and the V5 area of the visual cortex. The way it is generated as information reaching those areas of the brain can vary: it can travel either via the visual cortex of V1 or by-passing it (Zeki 1999a). When looking at the world around us we generally experience two types of motion: motion related to the V5 area; and motion created by the movement of the eyeballs. There is one more distinction in ways of seeing motion: seeing motion per se as something physically moving in space; and motion created in the brain. The latter engages cells located in the area V3 and the region above it, V3a. The brain records lines that are repeated and do not change direction or visually contradict each other, as in being horizontal or vertical. Specially orientated lines that repeat themselves provide the brain with the detection of movement (McKeefry et al. 1997, Palmer 2002). This is not restricted to lines per se. It is also related to compositions arranged by lines as in the Gestalt principle. It can be seen in the depictions of rhinoceroses, lions and horses, from the Chauvet Cave imagery to open-air Palaeolithic rock art in Portugal (Figure 1.22). The single rhinoceros at the front of the picture with the Chauvet style ears and hooves looks almost static, while lines indicating the backs of five further individuals, along with a sequence of the horns decreasing in size, conveys movement very convincingly. In recent years, further research into the visual perception of motion has produced some very interesting results that allow us to interpret contemporary and past artists’ intentionality in creating images. This is related to the notion of how

FIGURE 1.22 Unknown artist, Chauvet Cave, moving rhinos, between c. 32,000 and 26,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Moving rhinos, Chauvet Cave. ancient.eu).

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humans respond to still images. The research suggests that while looking at still pictures of an object that we know from experience is connected to motion, our brains activate the areas responsible for perceiving movement or action (Kourtzi and Kanwisher 2000, Proverbio et al. 2009). These authors propose that such stimuli indicate motion to the brain by perceiving ‘the object immediately before and after the photograph was taken’ (Kourtzi and Kanwisher 2000: 48). Other research on this topic, in particular bodily responses to static images representing motion, provides further support for these findings (Proverbio et al. 2009). Increased respiration and heart rates in observers was recorded when they were looking at static pictures of people engaged in physical activities, as if by looking at snapshots of pictures of people exercising, the viewer starts to exercise without performing any physical activity. Increased activity was noted in the extrastriate body area (EBA, located at the posterior inferior temporal sulcus and the temporal gyrus), superior temporal gyrus, a promoter area of the brain involved in the visual comprehension of static pictures of images representing action. It is like looking at a picture of a runner or a skier and implicitly knowing that they represent action/movement due to the stimulation of particular brain areas and their physiological responses. Furthermore, we implicitly know that a person or object has shifted from one place to another, from one position to another, in the process of movement. It is essential for us to be aware of how we see images, and how the artist’s intentionality is employed in visual communication, and we will return to this in Chapters 3 and 6. Looking at pictures created by Opie (Figure 1.23a) of cars on the street, we see movement. Similarly, we experience seeing movement when looking at the waiting lions on the walls of Chauvet Cave (Figure 1.23b), or a hunter ready to release an arrow in the rock art of northern Russia (Figure 1.23c). When we combine what we know about our responses to the organisation of lines and static images of action, and when we look at the lions of Chauvet Cave, we anticipate their attack on their prey. In Opie’s picture we see a bus, a people carrier and part of an ordinary car moving along a road. Furthermore, if we look at the hunter in our example from northern European rock art (Figure 1.23c), he is ready to release an arrow from the bow to strike a creature on the top of a tree already full of arrows. The visual elements in this composition give us the clue to what we see, and the intentionality of the artist is clear to us. What we see here is the creation of dynamic information from static images: motion therefore is captured in objects that are stationary but representing motion. These ideas will be further explored in Chapter 3 and 6.

Seeing abstract images and beyond One of the most interesting aspects of art is the mixing of real with abstract, using the ‘wrong’ colours in showing particular images, allowing us to create visual metaphors and use our neurophysiological capacities in shaping the world around us as culturally defined. This started thousands of years ago and continues

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a) Julian Opie, Siren Radio Traffic, from Eight Landscapes, 2000 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: © Julian Opie); b) unknown artist, Chauvet Cave, lions, between c. 32,000 and 26,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Lions, Chauvet Cave. Wikipedia); c) unknown artist, Zalavruga rock art carvings, hunting scene with the bow, c. 4,500 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

FIGURE 1.23

today, allowing we humans to both distinguish ourselves from each other and to connect to each other, as discussed in Chapter 4. The discovery of the Chauvet Cave in 1994 by local speleologists, who on 18 December that year went on an expedition to look for new undiscovered caves with no idea of the impact their discovery that day would have on our understanding of art and the way we see ourselves as humans. Up until the discovery of Chauvet, the depiction of hunting, long regarded as the preeminent Paleolithic activity, was always related to humans. Indeed, for many years the most influential interpretations of Palaeolithic cave art were all about hunting magic. Looking at the animals depicted on the walls of the cave, archaeologists realized that many of them were carnivorous animals, animals that hunt. Suddenly the hunting magic hypothesis no longer seemed relevant. Perhaps these images were not about humans securing a successful hunt by painting or carving pictures of their prey, because we could also see numerous images of lions and lionesses ready to strike. These discoveries had a profound impact on how we now interpret prehistoric art: going beyond ideas about hunting magic.

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Of equal significance, the Chauvet cave images exhibit a fully developed realistic style in depicting animals: there is nothing simple or simplistic about them. Since they were dated to over 15,000 years earlier than previously discovered cave paintings in France and Spain, the idea of art developing from simple to complex no longer works. We learned that humans could draw, paint and carve with great sophistication much earlier than previously thought. This leads to new questions about human development and the way we express ourselves via visual art. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the art at Chauvet for this part of the book is the use of colours that were not true to life. For example, the bear outline was painted in red and the mammoth shape was composed of a number of human hand prints. We have discussed above how our ancestors used colour as a metaphor when depicting the world around them. This creation of visual metaphors using both realistic and abstract imagery is seen today as very modern, similar to the early 20th century Fauvist painters, who, for example use yellow to paint a dog or blue to paint a tree: The surprise is even greater when we attempt the Fauvist experiment, and study the brain’s activity when the same objects in the experiment described above are invested with unnatural colours or rather colours with which they are not usually associated. Once again, the V4 complex – apparently only concerned with constructing colours to any particular objects – is active. But there any similarity between this and the preceding experiments ends. In the Fauvist experiment there is no hippocampal activity and the activity in the frontal cortex in not located in the same zone as that produced when we view natural colours; instead it is located in the middle frontal convolution. This is not to imply that the middle frontal convolution is given over exclusively to the perception of objects when they are invested with unnatural colours, and certainly not to the Fauvist works of art. It is more likely that it is the element of the unnatural that is activating a different part of the frontal lobe – often referred as a monitoring station … (Zeki 1999a: 201). One of the main characteristics of Fauvism was to emphasize colour over the representation or realistic depiction of the scene or object. In this way houses could be green. We cannot say that prehistoric artists were Fauvists, but what we can say is that they used the same artistic medium in non-verbally communicating with their audience. They were not surrealist painters either: It is more likely that it is the element of the unnatural that is activating a different part of the frontal lobe – often referred as a monitoring station; I should be most surprised if the unusual element in the work of Magritte, for example, does not also activate the monitoring system. (Zeki 1999a: 201) Nevertheless, they used the same ‘tricks of the trade’ as artists thousands of years later. The example of the images constructed from hand prints in Chauvet Cave comes to mind. One of the animals (Figure 1.23) on the walls of the Chauvet Cave was created by placing together numbers of large red dots, which on

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closer inspection are hand prints, not only stimulating brain areas V1 and V4 linked with abstract images, but also engaging areas located in front of V4 reaching into the temporal lobe, and the area of the middle frontal convolution of the frontal cortex (Zeki 1999a: 201). The use of abstract versus representational art, the use of realistic versus abstract colours, and the use of surrealistic imagery, by stimulating different areas of the brain, allows artists to reach their audience by evoking various parts of the brain to enhance artistic expressions. What is also interesting when discussing neuroaesthetics and visual nonverbal communication is the use of red colour, which is not well visible in the darkness of the cave but which would ‘strike’ us with photons of long wavelength when lit by the artificial light of a torch. Looking ourselves at this example in books or on the web, we can see/experience how prehistoric artists used human neurophysiological capacities to communicate most effectively with audiences in both the past and the present.

Summary The answer to the question of how contemporary is prehistoric art, put forward at the start of this part of the chapter, becomes somewhat irrelevant, since there is no contemporary versus past visual art where human neurophysiology is concerned. The creators of the images used the same visual capacities of being human and manipulated them in the quest for nonverbal communication with their viewers and audiences over thousands of years. Transcending different ideologies, visual art is a vehicle for expressing cultural, social, and symbolic issues that comprise the second part of seeing, since how we understand what we see is based not only on the neurophysiological capacities of our bodies, but also on information related to the knowledge we have generated through our lives as a part of being in the world. The brain needs to categorize the incoming information and can do this only via the knowledge it has accumulated to allow us to anticipate particular events or visual stimulates. This knowledge can be gained by learning at school, by playing, by digging in the garden, by washing dishes, by reading books: in general, by being alive. In other words, we shape our brains by our experiences and the cultural contexts in which we conduct our lives. This is the topic of the next chapter.

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Ellis, D. E. (1938). A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. Ekman, P. (1993). ‘Facial expression and emotion’, American Psychologist 48(4): 384–392. Ekman, P., and W. Friesen (1978). Facial Action Coding System: A Technique for the Measurement of Facial Movement, Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press. Evans, S. (2016). Communication and Information Storage in the Upper Palaeolithic: An Analysis of Geometrically Engraved Bone and Antler Objects from Western Europe, PhD dissertation. Cambridge: University of Cambridge. Fechner, G. T. (1876). Vorschule der Aesthetik, Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel. Ferri, F., F. Frassinetti, M. Ardizzi, M. Costantini, and V. Gallese (2012). ‘A sensorimotor network for the bodily self’, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 24: 1584–1595. Gage, J. (2006). Colour in Art, London: Thames & Hudson Ltd. Galati, G., G. Pelle, and A. Berthoz (2010). ‘Multiple reference frames used by human brain for special perception and memory’, Experimental Brain Research 206: 109–120. Gombrich, E. H. (1960). Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, London: Phaidon. Gombrich, E. H. (1979). The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, Oxford: Phaidon. Goodale, M. A., and A. D. Milner (1992). ‘Separate visual pathways for perception and action’, Trends Neuroscience 15(1): 20–25. Grosbras, M.-H., S. Beaton, and S. B. Eickhoff (2012). ‘Brain regions involved in human movement perception: A quantitative voxel-based meta-analysis’, Human Brain Mapping 33: 431–454. Haxby, J. V., E. A. Hoffman, and M. I. Gobbini (2000). ‘The distributed human neural system for face perception’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4: 223–232. Hodgson, D. (2003). ‘Seeing the “unseen”: Fragmented cues and the implicit in Palaeolithic art’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 13(1): 97–106. Hodgson, D. (2006). ‘Understanding the origins of paleoart: The neurovisual resonance theory and brain functioning’, PaleoAnthropology 58: 54−56. Howe, C. Q., and D. Purves (2005). ‘Natural-scene geometry predicts the perception of angles and line orientation’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102(4): 1228–1233. Janik, L. (2012). ‘The social context of Palaeolithic figural art: Performativity, materialisation and fragmentation’, in K. Ruebens, I. Romanowska, and R. Bynoe (eds), Unravelling the Palaeolithic: Ten Years of Research at the Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins (CAHO, University of Southampton), 131–140, University of Southampton Series in Archaeology 8, Oxford: Archaeopress. Janik, L. (2013). ‘Joining forces: Neuroaesthetics, contemporary visual art and archaeological interpretation of the past’, in I. A. Russell and A. Cochrane (eds), Art and Archaeology: Collaborations, Conversations, Criticisms, 35–50, New York: Springer-Kluwer. Janik, L. (2014). ‘Seeing visual narrative: New methodologies in the study of prehistoric visual depictions’, Archaeological Dialogues 21(1): 103–126. Janik, L. (2018). ‘The unique and the common: The rock art of the White Sea’, in L. Janik (ed.), Rock Art of White Sea, 52–68, Uslan: Uslan Petroglyph Museum. Janik, L., C. Roughley, and K. Szczę sna (2007). ‘Skiing on the rocks: Experiential art of prehistoric fisher-gatherer-hunters from Northern Russia’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 17: 297–310. Kaner, S. (ed.) (2010). Power of Dogu: Ceramic Figurines from Ancient Japan, London: The British Museum Press.

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Kitada, R., Y. Okamoto, A. T. Sasaki, T. Kochiyama, M. Miyahara, S. J. Lederman, and N. Sadato (2013). ‘Early visual experience and the recognition of basic facial expressions: Involvement of the middle temporal and inferior frontal gyri during haptic identification by the early blind’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00007. Klíma, B. (1963). Vyzkum paleolitického sídliste Pavlov I, Prehled vyzkumu 1962, 4–6. Klíma, B. (1972). Zachranovací vyzkum na paleolitické stanici u Dolních Vestonic, Prehled vyzkumu 1971, 13–14. Klíma, B. (1973). Paleolitická stanice u Dolních Vestonic, Prehled Vyzkumu 1972, 14–15. Klíma, B. (1981). ‘Strední cást paleolitické stanice u Dolních Vestonic: Der mittlere Teil der paläolithischen Station bei Dolní Vestonice’, Památky Archeologické 73(1): 5–92. Klíma, B. (1983). ‘Une nouvelle statuette paléolithique à Dolní Vestonice’, Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique Francaise 80(6): 176–178. Kobayashi, T. (2004). Jomon Reflections, Oxford: Oxbow Books. Koenderink, J. J., A. J. van Doorn, and J. Wagemans (2012). ‘Picasso in the mind’s eye of the beholder: Three-dimensional filling-in of ambiguous line drawings’, Cognition 125: 394–412. Kourtzi, Z., and N. Kanwisher (2000). ‘Activation in human MT/MST by static images with implied motion’, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 12(1): 48–55. Kubilius, J., J. Wagemans, and H. P. de Beeck (2011). ‘Emergence of perceptual gestalts in the human visual cortex the case of the configural-superiority effect’, Psychological Science 22(10): 1296–1303. Lackoff, G., and M. Johnson (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh. Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, New York: Basic Books. Livingstone, M. (2002). Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing, New York: Harry N. Abrams. Lu, Z.-L., and G. Sperling (2005). ‘Black-white asymmetry in visual perception’, Journal of Vision 5: 1–5. McBrearty, S., and A. S. Brooks (2000). ‘The revolution that wasn’t: A new interpretation of the origin of modern human behaviour’, Journal of Human Evolution 39: 453–563. McKeefry, D. J., J. D. G. Watson, R. S. J. Frackwiak, K. Fong, and S. Zeki (1997). ‘The activity in human areas V1/V2, V3 and V5 during the perception of coherent and incoherent motion’, Neuroimage 5: 1–12. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002). Phenomenology of Perception, London and New York: Routledge Classics. Milner, A. D., and M. A. Goodale (2008). ‘Two visual systems re-viewed’, Neuropsychologia 46(3): 774–785. Morris-Kay, G. (2010). ‘The evolution of human artistic creativity’, Journal of Anatomy 216 (2): 158–176. Mulvaney, K. (2003). ‘Transformations – rock walls to canvas: Representation of totemic geography in Aboriginal Australia’, Before Farming 5: 297–308. Nadal, M., E. Munar, M. À. Capó, J. Rosselló, and C. J. Cela-Conde (2008). ‘Towards a framework for the study of the neural correlates of aesthetic preference’, Spatial Vision 21(3–5): 379–396. Onians, J. (2010). ‘The role of experiential knowledge in the ultimate design studio: The brain’, Journal of Research Practice 6(2): 1–21. Palmer, S. E. (2002). Science of Vision, Photons to Phenomenology, Cambridge, MA: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. Proverbio, A. M., F. Riva, and A. Zan (2009). ‘Observation of static pictures of dynamic actions enhances the activity of movement-related brain areas’, PLoS ONE 4(5): e5389. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005389.

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Ratey, J. J. (2002). The User’s Guide to the Brain, London: Vintage. Renfrew, C. (2008). ‘Neuroscience, evolution and the sapient paradox: The factuality of value and of the scared’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 363: 2041–2047. Rossion, B. (2013). ‘The composite face illusion: A whole window into our understanding of holistic face perception’, Visual Cognition 21(2): 139–253. Ruby, P., and J. Decety (2001). ‘Effect of subjective perspective taking during simulation of action: A PET investigation of agency’, Nature Neuroscience 4: 546–550. Shimamura, A. P. (2013). Experiencing Art: In the Brain of the Beholder, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Soffer, O., and P. Vandiver (1994). ‘The ceramics’, in J. Svoboda (ed.), Pavlov I – Excavations 1952–53, 161–173, Liège: ERAUL 66/Dolní Vestonice Studies 2. Soffer, O., and P. Vandiver (1997). ‘The ceramics from Pavlov I – 1957 excavation’, in J. Svoboda (ed.), Pavlov I – Northwest: The Upper Paleolithic Burial and Its Settlement Context, 383–401, Brno: Dolní Vestonice Studies 4. Soffer, O., and P. Vandiver (2005). ‘Ceramic fragments’, in J. Svoboda (ed.), Pavlov I – Southeast: A Window into the Gravettian Lifestyles, 415–431, Brno: Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Institute of Archaeology at Brno, Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals, Brno. Stéphane, L. (1943). ‘La Marche, Commune de Lussac-les-Châteaux (Vienne)’, Bulletin de la Société préhistorique de France 40(7–9): 166–180. Suido, T., H. Tomomitsu, and K. Mogi (2012). ‘Egocentric mental transformation of self: Effects of spatial relationship in mirror-image and anatomic imitations’, Experimental Brain Review 221: 27–32. Treccani, B., and R. Cubelli (2011). ‘The need for a revised version of the Benton judgment of line orientation test’, Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology 33(2): 249–256. Urbanski, M., and P. Bartolomeo (2008). ‘Line bisection in left neglect: The importance of starting right’, Cortex 44(7): 782–793. Verpoote, A. (2001). Places of Art, Traces of Fire: A Contextual Approach to Anthropomorphic Figurines in the Pavlovian (Central Europe, 29–24 kyr BP), Leiden: Faculty of Archaeology, University of Leiden. Wagemans, J., J. De Winter, H. Op de Beeck, A. Ploegerô, T. Beckers, and P. Vanroose (2008). ‘Identification of everyday objects on the basis of silhouette and outline versions’, Perception 37: 207–244. Wagemans, J., J. H. Elder, M. Kubovy, S. E. Palmer, M. A. Peterson, M. Singh, and R. von der Heydt (2012b). ‘A century of Gestalt psychology in visual perception I. Perceptual grouping and figure-ground organization’, Psychological Bulletin 138(6): 1172–1217. Wagemans, J., J. Feldman, S. Gepshtein, R. Kimchi, J. R. Pomerantz, P. A. van der Helm, and C. van Leeuwen (2012a). ‘A century of Gestalt psychology in visual perception: II. Conceptual and theoretical foundations’, Psychological Bulletin 138(6): 1218–1252. doi:10.1037/a0029334. Zarkadi, T., and S. Schnall (2013). ‘“Black and white” thinking: Visual contrast polarizes moral judgement’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 49: 355–359. Zeki, S. (1999a). ‘Art and the brain’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 6(6–7): 76–96. Zeki, S. (1999b). Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain, New York: Oxford University Press. Zics, B. (2015). https://brigittazics.com/work/experiential-art-manifesto/ (accessed October 2018).

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Art Story. theartstory.org (accessed June 2019). Carlton, P. desertriversea.com.au (accessed Oct 2017). Cortex functional areas. Wikimedia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cortex_ functional_areas.jpg (accessed October 2017). Elizabeth I, the Darnley Portrait. Wikimedia. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ commons/a/af/Darnley_stage_3.jpg (accessed June 2019). Engraved ochre, Blombos Cave. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blombos Cave#/media/File:Blombos_Cave_-_3.jpg (accessed June 2019). Hobbema. Wikimedia. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/ Meindert_Hobbema_001.jpg (accessed October 2017). Lions, Chauvet Cave. Wikimedia. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/ thumb/2/2d/Lions_painting%2C_Chauvet_Cave_%28museum_replica%29.jpg/800pxlions_painting%2C_Chauvet_Cave_%28museum_replica%29.jpg (accessed June 2019). Moving rhinos, Chauvet Cave. ancient.eu. www.ancient.eu/uploads/images/6350.jpg? v=1486729814 (accessed June 2019). Owl, Chauvet Cave. Wikimedia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category: Chauvet_ Cave#/media/File:Owlengraving,_Chauvet_Cave_(museum_replica).jpg (accessed June 2019). Patriarch, Rouffignac Cave. grottederouffignac. www.grottederouffignac.fr/images/i_grotteder ouffignac/24rouffignac-patriarche.jpg (accessed June 2019). Piranesi. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GiovanniBattista_Piranesi#/media/File: PiranesiPyramid.jpg (accessed June 2019). Rhinos, Chauvet Cave. Wikimedia. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/ 1/17/Rhinos_Chauvet_Cave.jpg (accessed June 2019). Two-streams hypothesis. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-streams_hypothesis (accessed October 2017).

2 THE ORIGINS OF ART

Introduction This chapter focuses on visual perception. Visual perception relies on the second aspect of seeing that goes beyond the neurophysiological capacity to see, and is shaped by the culturally governed aesthetic preferences that define beauty. Furthermore, culturally defined interpretation and understanding of the world both create tools that give meaning to the world and allow us to visualise the world via material culture and aesthetic visual preferences. They also create visual metaphors that are essential to visual art and to us as humans.

Visual perception and art The way visual perception works is well illustrated in the painting ascribed to Jacques de Bellange, Lamentation upon the Dead Christ, as explained by JeanPierre Changeux (1994): The neural stages and pathways for understanding this painting can be charted from the visual to the temporal then to the parietal areas of the brain. The contemplation of the painting begins with vision itself, which involves the parallel progression from the dorsal pathway (or ‘where’ stream) to the parietal lobe for the location of objects and from the ventral pathway (or ‘what’ stream) for the identification of objects, faces, and colour in the temporal lobes. But viewing the painting becomes a ‘re-creation’ of it, since its mental reconstruction goes beyond perception. It involves a state of ‘recognition’, in other words, linking the forms and figures to a meaning. In fact, the contemplation of the artwork can be likened to a form of reasoning whereby the

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viewer progressively captures a rhythmical synthesis of those forms, figures and colours in the painting – an organisation that the art historian Ernst Gombrich would have called ‘a chorus effect’. (Changeux 1994: 38 in Nalbantian 2008: 359) This suggests that we cannot separate our life experiences and cultural preferences from our neurophysiological capacities of seeing, with one reinforcing the other. How cultural context allows artists in the past and present to manipulate these capacities in creating visual metaphors, the basis of visual communication between individuals, communities and cultures, is one of the major themes of this book. Art stimulates this mental synthesis within the viewer. The memory process is engaged as the painting elicits the viewer’s stored, long-term unconscious memories and puts them into dialogue with conscious shortterm memory. This actualisation is to some extent open-ended and polysemic, also dependent on the cultural identity of its audience and its recourse to long-term cultural memory. Inherited ‘memes’ are recovered that transmit cultural objects to the artist and viewer. This painting with the dead Christ figure possesses a symbolic dimension, involving longterm cultural memory of Christian iconography beyond the mimetic representation of images. But it also has a more general affective impact, involving the spectator’s reaction to death. The ‘top-down’ power of exploration of the painting occurs as the neuronal workspace networks set up connections with the underlying emotional input of the limbic system connected to the cultural background of the viewer and the provocation of personal memories. The painting offers a plurality of meanings through its evocative power of different individual experiences. As the prefrontal cortex provides an organisation for the multiple points of reference, a mental reconstruction takes place. (Nalbantian 2008: 359–360) Before further discussing visual art, let us first clarify what we think art is. To do this I propose to look at the concept of art as presented in the Oxford English Dictionary. This very general understanding of art is used here only as a heuristic device to establish the interpretative platform for what I mean by art, and then to contextualise it in the following chapters into particular past communities and contexts. It allows us to escape simplistic comparisons or historical notions of how the idea of art has developed through millennia in the context of art history or archaeology (e.g. Arnold 2004, Preziosi 1998, Sandler 1996, Westermann 2005). It will also allow us to focus on the contemporary understanding of art rather than moving into historical notions of art, for example as put forward by Gombrich.

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Art: • 1 [mass noun] the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power: the art of the Renaissance great art is concerned with moral imperfections she studied art in Paris • works produced by human creative skill and imagination: his collection of modern art [as modifier]: an art critic • creative activity resulting in the production of paintings, drawings, or sculpture: she’s good at art • 2 (the arts) the various branches of creative activity, such as painting, music, literature, and dance: the visual arts [in singular]: the art of photography • 3 (arts) subjects of study primarily concerned with human creativity and social life, such as languages, literature, and history (as contrasted with scientific or technical subjects): the belief that the arts and sciences were incompatible the Faculty of Arts • 4 a skill at doing a specified thing, typically one acquired through practice: the art of conversation. (oxforddictionaries.com) This definition suggests that, broadly speaking, art is both a product and an activity, as well as being an expression of a need to engage in the production of images in the process of visual communication. Visual art is produced through the engagement between visual image and concept in the process of creating visual metaphor based on the creative aspects of being human, including our neurophysiological capacities to communicate visually. The metaphors that lead humans to modify and transform material culture in the act of non-verbal communication is specific to particular times and places (Janik 2012, 2013, Sapwell and Janik 2015). This way of understanding visual art leads to differing interpretations of the meanings of similar images in different cultures and communities. The images used in advertising by the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC bank) in their global campaign, provide a good example (Figure 2.1). To challenge the viewer HSBC uses words that capture meanings that are contradictory or mutually exclusive. One of the advertising posters used by the bank shows the juxtaposition of four pictures and words with contradictory meanings leading to opposing interpretations (Figure 2.1). The images are the leaning tower of Pisa and an ancient sculpture depicting a male torso. These images are repeated twice and superimposed with the words ‘perfect’ and ‘imperfect’, guiding us to interpret the images in contradictory ways: the famous bell tower built in the Italian city of Pisa during the Medieval period can either be seen as the perfect expression of the architectural styles and technical achievements of the builders of the time or it can be

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FIGURE 2.1 Images and words used in the HSBC advertisement; a) Tower of Pisa; b) ancient Greek torso.

seen to illustrate the inadequacy of the builders’ knowledge, which led the tower to subside and lean almost immediately after being erected, only to be saved by the technical expertize of the 20th and 21st centuries. Looking at the second pair of images we can ask: does the ancient sculpture show a perfect male body and the highly appreciated artistic capacity of the ancient artists, or is it just an old sculpture of a man which is missing its head and hands? Or we can ask, are the images and the meanings given to them by the contrasting terms words in this advertising poster so displayed to make us think that everything can be seen in different ways depending on the context, or are they intended to remind us that there are always two ‘sides to the same coin’? Through interpreting the poster, we confirm our own understanding about what we see, while at the same time questioning the values and norms that are part of our cultural status quo. Such contradiction in turn facilitates our understanding of the present and the past as part of our culture or as a way in questioning it, and to see how the past differed from what is familiar to

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us today. To discuss this further, I will first concentrate on two central issues in visual art: the art object and the artist.

The art object and the artist: art history Descriptions of art objects and the names of those who created them were assembled for the first time by Pliny the Elder in his work Natural History around 2096–2098 years ago. He wrote about particular sculptures and attributed them title and artist, in a way that allowed scholars in the 18th century to name particular sculptures as well as recognize the artists who made them. This created the basis for the art history we know today.

Giorgio Vasari One of the most influential figures within art history, whose ideas played a fundamental part in traditional Western art history, is Giorgio Vasari. His work, Lives of the Most Prominent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, first published in 1550 and followed by a second expanded edition, was translated into English in 1685. The three parts of the book draw attention to particular artists and their material creations, setting the rules followed by future art historians. Vasari introduced the idea of the Renaissance as a rebirth after the Gothic period, linked with Goths, the pagans who destroyed the splendours antiquity. Drawing inspiration from the world of antiquity is related to this rebirth after the Dark Ages. By creating this distinction, Vasari formulates the idea that the art of the Renaissance is of a higher value than that which went before it. Furthermore, he passed judgement on the quality of the objects on the basis of who made them. In this way, by establishing who were outstanding artists, he gave value to objects as masterpieces (Gombrich 1950, Preziosi 1998). All the objects made by earlier and later artists were assessed in accordance with how closely they followed the masterpiece. These masterpieces created a canon, the best examples of art work related to any particular period produced by defined artists (Gombrich 1979). So, if, according to Vasari the most advanced period was the High Renaissance, with the masters being Raphael and Michelangelo, this meant that all other works of art were assessed in comparison to their masterpieces, rather than on their own merit. The human being was the focus in Renaissance ideas as a reflection of beauty: beauty, however, is a manifestation of God’s perfection. Therefore, what was expressed in the visual art of the period articulated the glory of God and His Creation. Vasari expressed his ideas as a man of his time. He focused on Florentine artists as the best masters and omitted female artists. What is most striking, however, are not Vasari’s ideas created in the particular cultural and historical context of Renaissance Florence, but rather the subsequent followers of his ideas who still give priority to Renaissance art and artists, as well as reinforce his prejudices, for instance denying the importance of female artists (Chadwick

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1996). Fortunately, such approaches have been questioned in recent years, opening up art history to other points of view, where not only men are seen as playing a part in the creative process of the production of visual arts (Arnold 2004, Parker and Pollock 1981, Pollock 1988, Salomon 1991). Vasari’s writing has been enormously influential in the way artists and their work have been understood, creating a strong belief that the Renaissance was the most artistically accomplished period. The French archaeologist Breuil

FIGURE 2.2 a) unknown artist/s, Lascaux Cave, Hall of Bulls, dated c. 15,500 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Hall of Bulls, Lascaux Cave. archeologie. culture); b) Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, Sistine Chapel’s ceiling and walls, 1508-1512, (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Sistine Chapel, Rome. Wikipedia).

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(1952) proclaimed what are now known as the 15,000 year-old paintings of Lascaux (Figure 2.2a) as an achievement of human creativity only comparable to work of equal quality, namely the ceiling painting in the Sistine Chapel in Rome painted between 1508–1512 (Figure 2.2b). The chapel was painted in the High Renaissance period by Michelangelo, according to Vasari one of the most acclaimed artists ever. By comparing it in this way, prehistoric cave art is given the highest accolade in terms of its artistic value. As in Vasari’s interpretation, art created before or after the High Renaissance was clearly of a lower quality than creations of the Magdalenian period, whose highest artistic achievement was the Lascaux cave paintings. The same principle was used in reviewing the recent British Museum exhibition, Ice Age Art: Arrival of Modern Mind (Cook 2013), describing the head carved from mammoth ivory as an ‘Ice Age Mona Lisa’. This name referenced the painting ‘Mona Lisa’ by Leonardo Da Vinci, the master of High Renaissance as defined by Vasari (Sooke 2013).

Johann Joachim Winckelmann After the Renaissance, renewed interest in antiquity in the 18th century led to the birth of the history of art as a discipline. Johann Joachim Winckelmann was the key figure. He was particularly interested in a Greek sculpture of the 5th century BCE, around 2500 years ago, which he saw as the highest artistic manifestation of the human creative spirit (Figure 2.3a). This sculpture is a Roman copy of a Greek figure representing the well-muscled body of Doryphoros (the spear-bearer) in the pose of contrapposto, where the balance of the body is supported on one foot and the axis of the body above the hips is twisted slightly, giving the sculpture the appearance of movement while being relaxed at the same time. Winckelmann defined later sculpture of the Hellenistic period, for example the Nike of Samothrace (Figure 2.3b), as expressing a decline in art through ‘degeneration’ or ‘excess’, ideas similar to those put forward for Renaissance art by Vasari. The female figure represents the Greek goddess of Victory and is called the Winged Victory of Samothrace; today it is missing its arms and head. Her body is draped in a flowing cloth with a pair of wings on her back. The sculpture emanates a sense of movement and action. In his work The History of the Art of Antiquity (1764), Winckelmann proposed a system for the development of art as a comparison between artistic styles and birth, maturity, and death (Arnold 2004, Preziosi 1998: 23). The idea of tracing how artistic styles developed is acknowledged as the backbone of traditional art history and classical archaeology. Original Greek sculptures, however, did not survive into the 18th century, so Winckelmann relied on Roman copies and descriptions found in works such as Natural History by Pliny the Elder. While Vasari stressed the importance of the artist, Winckelmann followed Hegel’s idea that art is the result of the ‘workings of a ‘world of spirit’ (Arnold 2004: 40), focusing on the art object and the

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a) unknown artist, a Roman period copy of the Doryphoros of Polykleitos, c. 2,440 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Doryphoros of Polykleitos. Wikimedia); b) unknown artist, Nike of Samothrace/Winged Victory of Samothrace, c. 2,200–2,190 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Nike of Samothrace. Wikimedia).

FIGURE 2.3

ideas it embodies. Understanding that art objects reflect the particular style and spiritual achievements of the makers is of more importance than the artist himself. Following this argument, we can say that by looking at any art historical book we can see how art objects embody style, while styles reflect particular ideas. These ideas are materialised in art objects, so art objects materialise ideas.

Contemporary approaches By creating timelines that divide time into periods from prehistory to today, we organise art objects to indicate our own knowledge and cultural background. To avoid falling into the trap of the evolutionary principle of the development of art as proposed by Vasari or Winckelmann, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York divides their timeline into different parts of the world according to calendar years. But when we look closer, even their seemingly more sophisticated timeline still emphasises objects that are regarded as defining particular times and ideas as in traditional history of art, even though it acknowledges the post-colonial world, recognising the art of Africa, America or Australia. The Metropolitan’s timeline also reflects the political division and the ideological

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distinction between countries in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. For example Russia, one of the most influential centres of art movements and artists in the 20th century, is missing from the map showing the world from 1900 to the present (metmuseum). This is not due to any lack of works in the Museum: by searching for names of Russian artists in the Museum catalogue, such as Malevich, Lissitzky or Rodchenko, we can find and admire their works. But they are absent from the timeline. The selection of works of art for inclusion in the timeline illustrates both the context of understanding of what to include and what not to include, and what message is conveyed through such decisions. What we see in the timeline of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a human history exemplified via the quality of visual material culture. This way of defining human culture was challenged for the first time in 1917, when art historians started to question the way we look at and interpret visual culture. Art objects defined in Vassari’s term are objects made by a particular artist, where the quality of the objects reflects who made them. For Winckelmann, artistic objects are a reflection of the creativity of the human spirit, and for him the art object has primacy over the artist who made it. After 1917 we see a profound shift in thinking: any object, even if not made by the artist or under her or his instruction, can become an art object on the basis of the artist pronouncing it to be an art object. 1917 was the year when Marcel Duchamp created one of the most iconic sculptures of the modern world, naming an industrially-made male urinal the Fountain (Figure 2.4) (Mink 2001, Preziosi 1998). In recent years however, the authorship of the Fountain has been questioned and it is now suggested that it was made and submitted for exhibition in New York not by Duchamp at all, but by a woman, Baroness Elsa von FreytagLoringhoven (Hustvedt 2019). It was rejected from being shown at the Society for Independent Artists Exhibition in New York. Despite this seemingly inauspicious beginning, the arrival of this object on the art scene alters our perception of what an art object is. From this time onwards, it is the artist who decides what is the art object; it can be an ordinary object bought in a local shop, but since an artist has declared it to be an art object, so it it becomes an art object. Furthermore, the artist also decides on the message he or she attaches to any particular art object. To materialize their idea or create a visual metaphor, the artist communicates to the viewer via such objects, as illustrated in Figure 2.4. After the Second World War visual art was no longer confined to particular materials. For example, artists began to make sculptures from a range of new materials, including ice, sand and paper (Archer 2002, Rush 1999). The choice of these ephemeral materials led to the need to ‘capture’ the art object using a different, more permanent medium; the photograph became the reflection of the image, in turn making the photograph an art object in its own right since it embodies the original artwork that itself is now vanished. Furthermore, from this time, visual art also focuses on the visual recording of particular engagements and those recordings themselves become art objects, for example Richard Long’s engagements with the landscape. This is how, what is after all, just a photograph of the marks left on the grass as a result of a walk

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Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: © Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019).

FIGURE 2.4

taken in 1967 comes to be hanging in the Tate Modern, one of the most prestigious modern art museums in the world; because it was decided by the artist that this photo itself is a work of art, commemorating and recording his walk, rather than being simply a photograph of a straight trail left by a walk across the green towards a group of large bushes and small trees. The landscape itself becomes a work of art, as explored by Christo and JeanneClaude, whether in the open environment of Biscayne Bay in Florida, where they surrounded a couple of islands by covering the surface of the water around them with pink material, or in the urban context, where they wrapped up the Reichstag building in Berlin in white fabric, or the Pont Neuf in Paris, covering the structures and leaving only the outlines visible to tourists and inhabitants alike (Figure 2.5).

Conceptual art As we can see, there is no restriction on contemporary art, in regard to what it is made from or where it is exhibited: in the museum, gallery or natural landscape. What makes it art is the artist who gives it meaning. This emphasis on the artist rather than the art object allows us to deal with images in a completely different

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Christo, Wrapped Pont Neuf, Paris, 1985 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Wikipedia).

FIGURE 2.5

way from before, but of course it can also can create confusion. Encounters between some contemporary art and people who are not explicitly told that something is an art object can sometimes bring unwelcome results, and the boundaries can be blurred to such an extent that it can lead to the destruction of art, deliberate or otherwise. In November 2011, a cleaner at the Ostwall Museum in Dortmund mistook a work of art called When It Starts Dripping from the Ceiling by Martin Kippenberger for a dirty puddle of drying water and cleaned it up (Pidd 2011). The ‘puddle’ was in fact paint sprayed on the floor by the artist to imitate drying water under the wooden structure. The art work was insured for £690,000/€800,000 but the cleaner’s efforts wiped out the art work for ever. Similarly, sometimes when the viewer tries to understand contemporary art displayed in museums, the meaning the artist is trying to convey can remain elusive. Two examples from the Tate Modern and Saatchi Gallery come to mind, which illustrate well the difficulties one encounters when looking at certain art objects and when only by reading the explanation of what they mean can we understand the metaphor they embody. First is a sculpture by Martin CraigMartin, An Oak Tree (1973). In this work, the artist deconstructs the idea of transformation within the religious context. He places a glass with water in it on a glass shelf and calls it an oak tree. In doing so he questions our assumptions of the context of belief, as well as what is culturally acceptable to believe in; as a Tate museum label describes

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… belief underlies our whole experience of art: it accounts for why some people are artists and others are not, why some people dismiss works of art others highly praise, and why something we know to be great does not always move us. (Tate) Second, is the highly acclaimed but controversial work My Bed (1998) by Tracey Emin (Figure 2.6): ‘a candid exploration of universal emotions’ according to the Saatchi Galley description of the bed and its surroundings. If it were made by a non-artist, such a display would not be part of a museum exhibition and would instead be treated as a simple expression of someone’s untidiness in their bedroom. The sculpture is composed of an unmade bed, with a pair of tights lying on it, along with a number of objects including a newspaper, cigarette box, slippers, used tissues and empty bottles of vodka lying on the mat by the side, and a small table covered by a number of items in apparent disarray. We can see in these examples the way the concept or idea takes central place in the process of its materialisation as art, but sometimes without knowing the concept, it is almost impossible to recognise it, because our own understanding of the world around us has not prepared us to see such apparently mundane items as art objects. What we see here again is a transformation, giving different meaning to things that already have meanings, creating multivocal understandings of the object and appreciation of it. The following quote from the art historian Christopher Reed suggests how we can now understand how art objects are given meaning in the context of post-modernity:

FIGURE 2.6 Tracey Emin, My Bed, 1998 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2019).

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Instead of pretending to an authoritative originality, post-modern concentrates on the way images and symbols (‘signifiers’) shift or lose their meaning when put in different contexts (‘appropriated’), revealing (‘deconstructing’) the process by which meaning is constructed. And because no set of signifiers, from art to advertising, is original, all are implicated in the ideologies (themselves patterns of language or representation, hence ‘discourses’) of cultures that produce and/or interpret them. (Reed 2003: 272) The meaning itself is part of the visual imagery. The first thing we notice when looking at Duchamp’s Fountain is a male urinal, since the object he named Fountain was created in the first place to be used as such. Therefore, our first reaction is based not on what the artist meant, but on what the object or set of objects look like, whether a glass of water or a bed with items scattered around. These objects are being used specifically by the artists to make viewers think ‘outside the box’, to question their expectations, assumptions and prejudices. This in turn allows us to become aware of other ways of thinking, metaphor creations, material culture associations and other visual cultures.

The art object and the artist: archaeology This contemporary understanding of visual art leads us to look at art objects as expressions of metaphor creation in the present and the past, and can be interpreted and understood via material remains. In recent years ideas about material culture and its place in human life have been discussed by a number of scholars (Appadurai 1986, Jones 2012, Knappett 2005, Meskell and Preucel 2004, Miller 2005). Some of these have pointed out the unique place of archaeology as a discipline that can contribute to contemporary social theory (Meskell and Preucel 2004, Webmoor and Witmore 2008). Of particular significance to archaeology is the theory of materiality, neatly summarized as ‘the ongoing dynamic of human-artifactual relationship’ (Knappett 2014: 4702). This relationship was introduced to archaeology through the works of anthropologists such as Arjun Appadurai (1986), Alfred Gell (1989) and Daniel Miller (2005). In this book I draw on the approach developed by Miller (2005: 4) which sees materiality as ‘situating material culture within a larger conceptualisation of culture’, which underpins concepts integral in the interpretation of archaeological remains, as shown and elaborated in the subsequent chapters. Archaeologists are often faced with an absence of data or material culture. But this does not mean that a particular activity did not happen or a visual metaphor was not created. The fact that certain materials do not survive, or that we do not have methods to recover them – as is usually the case of objects made from perishable material like plants, feathers, and leather – means that our record of the past is scarce and uneven, dependant on preservation and recovery as well as on the actions of humans who, in the past, decided to curate or discard specific

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parts of material culture. Wood preservation, due to waterlogging or desiccation, provides us with unique examples of how rich and visually arresting the artefacts have been. Fragments of ski sledges made out of soft wood from an unidentified deciduous tree were found in the Mesolithic settlements of Vis I dated to 9,000 and 7,800 years ago, and at Nizhneye Veretye, dated to 10,000 and 9,000 years ago (Burov 1989, 1998, Oshibkina 1989). The three ski fragments made of hard wood found at Nizhneye Veretye were decorated, ‘the edges and underside of the upturned end are covered with notches, while the upper surface is engraved with zig-zags’ (Burov 1989: 393). While these ornaments can be interpreted as unintentional, their presence on three fragments does indicate the purposeful use of decoration. One of the most impressive Mesolithic sculptures comes from a fragment of a ski from Vis I (Figure 2.7): The carved elk head projection, which was bevelled backwards, also has a practical use. Being lower than the gliding surface of the ski, it would have prevented the reverse movement of the ski over packed snow. It would also have served as a stabiliser preventing the lateral displacement of the ski end. (Burov 1989: 394) It is understood that one fragment of a ski end from Nizhneye Veretye probably depicts a bear. The interpretation of the elk head on the ski is often linked to the idea of rapid movement. The presence of bear heads, on the other hand, provides us with the opportunity to dispute this, as bears are often seen as strong rather than quick. Decorated artefacts used every day have been frequently discovered by archaeologists; fragments of a wooden handle finished with a duck’s head and bear’s head have been found on early settlements in northeastern Europe (Loze 1979, 1983, Miklyayev 1988, Oshibkina 1989),

FIGURE 2.7 Unknown artist, a fragment of a ski end finished with the elk’s head, Vis I, between c. 9,000 and 7,800 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Burov 1989).

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giving us a window into the aesthetics and visual culture of prehistoric fishergather-hunters and the choices in creating the objects which have been a part of prehistoric people’s lives. Understanding the relationship between an object and the way it looks is very important when talking about visual art and archaeology. This leads to a discussion of culturally governed visual preferences, linked with the concept of aesthetics. What visual qualities need to be embedded in an object to make it an art object? How does it look and in what ways is it important how it looks?

Archaeological objects, beauty and aesthetics Again I propose to refer to the Oxford English Dictionary, where we can find the definition of aesthetics: Origin: late 18th century (in the sense “relating to perception by the senses”): from Greek aisthētikos, from aisthēta “perceptible things”, from aisthesthai “perceive”. The sense “concerned with beauty” was coined in German in the mid-18th century and adopted into English in the early 19th century, but its use was controversial until much later in the century. As an adjective it means: • concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty: the pictures give great aesthetic pleasure • giving or designed to give pleasure through beauty: the law applies to both functional and aesthetic objects • as a singular noun it means; • a set of principles underlying the work of a particular artist or artistic movement: the Cubist aesthetic •

While the aesthetics plural noun (usually treated as singular) means: • •

a set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty the branch of philosophy which deals with questions of beauty and artistic taste. (oxforddictionaries.com)

What stands out in this definition is the idea of beauty: but how can we know what beauty is? It is a notion relating to our understanding of the quality of the image, again deeply embedded in Western art history. Let us again turn to the online Oxford English Dictionary for the meaning of beauty:

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Origin: Middle English: from Old French beaute, based on Latin bellus “beautiful, fine”. As a singular noun it means: 1. [mass noun] a combination of qualities, such as shape, colour, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight: I was struck by her beauty; an area of outstanding natural beauty • a combination of qualities that pleases the intellect: the artistry and beauty of football • [as modifier] denoting something intended to make someone more attractive: beauty treatment 2. a beautiful or pleasing thing or person, in particular: • a beautiful woman: a blonde beauty • an excellent example of something: the fish was a beauty, around 14 pounds • (the beauties of) the pleasing or attractive features of (something): the beauties of the English countryside • [in singular] the best aspect or advantage of something: the beauty of keeping cats is that they don’t tie you down. (oxforddictionaries.com) What we find is that the Oxford Dictionary definition of beauty is so vast that it covers almost all other aspects, most of which are not very useful to us. So, here I have put together a very short understanding of aesthetics and beauty on the basis of the characteristics provided by the dictionary. From all the possibilities presented to us by the dictionary, I choose the first definition, ‘a combination of qualities, such as shape, colour, or form’, and combine it with the definition of aesthetics, ‘a set of principles underlying the work of a particular artist or artistic movement’. What we end up with in the case of visual art is a ‘set of principles underlying the work of a particular artist or artistic movement based on a combination of qualities, such as shape, colour, or form’. This short definition is a perfect fit for understanding and interpreting issues that lie at the heart of archaeology: style, seriation, chronology. Beauty in this context is a canon or principle which governs in general how an object looks: colour, shape or type of material from which it was made. These issues are closely connected with the origin of archaeology as a discipline and the Three Age System.

Classification of archaeological style The Three Age System was the first system that allowed archaeologists to categorize objects according to their chronological order (Trigger 2008). It was proposed by Danish archaeologist Christian Jürgensen Thomsen who created a new exhibition and associated catalogue for the National Museum of Antiquity in Copenhagen and

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defined the chronological sequencing of objects in terms of what they were made from: stone, bronze and iron. He also examined the decoration on the objects, allowing him to distinguish further the objects and to group some of them more closely. In this way the Iron Age was divided according to decorative style: the earlier part was linked with curvilinear serpent motifs, and the later part with dragons and other fantastic animals (Trigger 2008). This way of distinguishing between objects was subsequently refined by other Scandinavian archaeologists and then adopted by the discipline all over the world. While today, however, as proposed by Sørensen (2015), new engagement is needed, keeping in mind the contemporary theoretical perspective on material culture while engaging with the issues of how objects were produced. It can be illustrated by the work of Radivojević et al. (2017), on the way the prehistoric artists have been mixing different minerals to achieve the desired yellow colour used around seven thousand years ago. What material objects were made of thus became a central mode in their description. This in turn gave us a time depth for understanding the process of becoming human, and a chronological tool for tracing the development of human visual expression. By characterising objects in terms of how they look, what they are made from and how they are decorated, we are keeping our enquiry within archaeological as well as traditional Western art historical conventions, based on the principle of how the object looks. The distinction between the two disciplines, archaeology and art history, according to Schapiro (1998), lies

FIGURE 2.8 Chronology and changes in shape of spear-points in Clovis Culture, South Carolina c. 13,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Clovis Culture. Wikimedia).

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in the way style is understood. In art history ‘style reflects or projects the “inner form” of collective thinking and feeling’ (Schapiro 1998: 143), and is composed of three aspects: ‘technique, the subject matter and material’ (Schapiro 1998: 145). Shapiro goes on to argue that in archaeology, style is used to establish connections between peoples, cultures and chronology, with little attention paid to the aesthetics of the object. In one way Schapiro is correct, but in another he is not. As archaeologists we take particular objects that are the best examples of specific characteristics, e.g. flint tools (Figure 2.8) or pottery vessels, and regard them as types reflecting the style. In the archaeological tradition, when we look at prehistoric material culture through style, the canon of how things look, e.g. the ideal stone tool, ideal pot, ideal bronze or metal object, has resulted in something very similar to Vasari’s or Winckelman’s notion of the masterpiece. Furthermore, if we look at the idea of historical periods and the sequencing of visual art in Europe from ‘classical, Postclassical, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, mannerist, baroque, rococo, and neoclassical’ periods, they carry the ‘relation between style and the progress of technology’ (Gombrich 1998: 153) that still underpins traditional archaeological discourse. We also enquire about the ‘“inner form” of collective thinking and feeling’ as suggested by Schapiro (1998: 143) by looking at, for instance, Celtic people, who are often defined by their visual style. The challenges that contest these traditional interpretations of archaeological data bring us closer to the post-modern understanding of material culture (Reed 2003), and the ways objects are used and negotiated in different cultures, contexts and interest groups. This can be illustrated by looking at the Banksy piece (Figure 2.9), in which we see a prehistoric man holding a bone in one hand, possibly the remains of his meal, while in the other he is holding a tray with take-away food. The portrayal of his head and face indicate an Ancestral Human, perhaps a Neanderthal, rather than a fully Modern Human. Despite no trademarks being displayed on the food containers, their shape indicates a source such as McDonalds, Burger King or Kentucky Fried Chicken. We know that these containers signify the consumption of fast food, part of our modern everyday life. But they are held in the hand of a prehistoric man, so that we can say we really are the same as the prehistoric man, and what distinguishes us is only the type of a meal we eat. Or is there another interpretation that depends on the cultural standpoint each of us take up for ourselves? The elements of this picture are in juxtaposition, since the various elements belong to different times, thousands of years apart, making us think and create meanings valid to us today.

Evolutionism One might ask why I use contemporary art rather than ethnographic analogies. In the course of this book I will present images and interpretations from historic and ethnographic communities, but as examples of the richness of human experience and expression in the same way that I use contemporary art. Images and case studies are used in this book as illustrations of the argument rather than

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Banksy, L.A. California, Untitled, Banksy, LA, 2008 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Courtesy of Pest Control Office).

FIGURE 2.9

analogies designed to argue for any relationship between prehistoric or ethnographic and anthropologically recorded communities. This also helps us to avoid the issue of value and cultural evolutionism, as explained below. Certain contemporary museums have displays that bring together contemporary, modern, historical, ethnographic and prehistoric art objects. The evolutionary description of art in the traditional way does not apply here. In this approach the notion of primitive versus high art is abandoned and the artistic value of all the exhibits becomes of equal standing. This has its roots in Duchamp’s act of naming the urinal, the Fountain, and defining it as an art object. This allows us to interpret past material culture as part of visual ‘art’ in its own right, not as a part of traditional art historical interpretation, as argued against by a number of archaeologists (Moro Abadía 2006, Moro Abadía and González 2010, Soffer and Conkey 1997), by providing a framework for interpretation integral to the archaeological inquiry of the 19th century. The approach proposed in this book tries to go beyond cultural evolutionism, one of the trends in archaeological thinking that transcends opposed theoretical viewpoints (Janik 2011, 2014). In general theoretical terms, when we employ

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Processual or New Archaeology approaches to the past, we are looking for patterns in archaeological data that lead us towards classifying the processes of human development. We look to see if the distribution of artefacts by aboriginal Australians is the same as those found in prehistoric contexts; and if they are, we conclude that these patterns suggest that they are at similar, if not the same, stage on the evolutionary trajectory. Within post-processual archaeology, while the interpretation of material culture emphasises the need to look for more culture-specific contextual approaches, evolutionary ideas are still strong, as can be demonstrated through a critical assessment of the work by Christopher Tilley. Tilley (1991) has sustained this evolutionary status quo by equating contemporary communities from all around the world with historic and prehistoric communities (Janik 1999, 2011). Prehistoric hunter-gatherer groups who made the art at Nämforsen in Sweden, equal historic hunter-gatherer communities of Evenks from Siberia and Saami from Finland, as well as contemporary aboriginal hunter-gatherer tribes from Australia. By the use of such analogies he proposes the existence of similarities in terms of cosmology and social interactions, and argues that what underpins this is the way they procure their food. What is missing here, as we can see, is the acknowledgement and incorporation into his interpretation of the historical context of particular communities and their cultural background, as well as the independent development of the particular communities used in the analogies. Furthermore, if we consider Tilley’s (1994) interpretation of how in the Mesolithic, dated to around 10,000 to 6,500 years ago, and the Neolithic, 6,500 to 4,000 years ago, communities in southern England and southwestern Wales conceptualised the landscape through building monuments, we can see how post-processual interpretation equates mobile communities of prehistoric Mesolithic Britain with modern African communities, and small scale Neolithic communities in Britain are considered to have their equivalents in small scale societies all over the world. The analogies proposed in this interpretation are even more wide-ranging, including Zaire, Alaska, Canada and Australia. From the landscapes of the frozen Arctic to the heat of Africa and Australia, all are treated the same: no distinction is drawn between availability of environments with different building materials, between rocks, ice, sand or timber. As we can see, both post-processual interpretations equal processual ways of classifying societies by comparing the past to the present, which creates the same narrative proposed for the first time in the 19th century. The use of ethnography or anthropology does not need to be restricted to making cross-cultural comparisons to equate past communities with contemporary or historical groups based on similar modes of food procurement or comparable size of the group. Instead the ethnographic record can be used as the basis for ideas that grow out of studying non-western societies, and used in the same way as the concepts we employ in conceptualising our own cultures in the postmodern world (e.g. de Beauvoir 1953, Douglas 1970, Said 1978, Strathern 1988). As presented above, contemporary art questions our status quo, and the same can be said about anthropology. Contemporary art history shares concerns with the anthropology of art and visual anthropology (Arnold 2004, Gell 1998,

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Jordanova 2012, Layton 1991, 2003, Morphy 2009, Morphy and Perkins 2006, Tanner and Osborne 2007, Westermann 2005, Zijlmans and van Damme 2005). All these disciplines look at the role visual art plays in society, how visual art reflects different aspects of the society that produces it, and how it influences societies by being an active mediator in social, cultural and economic processes, which are also part of contemporary archaeological inquiry.

Visual art and archaeology Archaeology, the discipline of the long durée, allows us to look at visual communication and visual art over thousands of years, in ways which are not available to anthropology or the history of art. This means we can trace the objects backwards, so to speak, from today into the past, but we cannot directly see how they worked in the contexts of the living communities of which they were a part, and therefore understand their role in the same way as anthropologists. We cannot inquire about art objects by going back to Pliny’s writings to learn whom or what they represent: we cannot match the sculpture with the description of contemporaries as an art historian can. But what archaeologists can do is to look at the aesthetics of material culture, how objects look and what meaning we can infer from that. We can pursue this in a number of ways: can we detect change (or not) in the way objects look; is such change (or lack of it) linked to the alteration in function, or the context in which the object is set; does the meaning of an object embody change in its appearance or does it stay the same? In similar ways we look at contemporary visual art. In Britain in the 1980s and 1990s, BritArt created a new aesthetic visual vocabulary at the time of the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher (Cork 2003). It was a time of great social change, as the idea of the individual as the most important social unit grew, and the past social consensus, in which community and society were prioritised, was broken. The old values were changing and new artists were putting forward a new aesthetic. This new aesthetic challenged the understanding of the visual art status quo. At the same time, however, the ‘old fashioned’ form of visual expression, such as realistic paintings (not the shark in formaldehyde), continued to be created (Cork 2003). This can be best seen at the Saatchi Gallery in London. This is due to the post-modern idea that every way of expressing oneself via visual media is valid and equal, there is no one single aesthetic, and there is no one single valid approach. We should take this into account and remember as archaeologists that aesthetics can apply to different ways of interpreting things that may look different or the same in specific cultural, social, ideological or economic contexts. As archaeologists, we can trace trends by applying the very general approach used in art history, but because we are doing this in the contemporary world, we see visual communication as a part of social relations, ideologies, cultures and economic contexts via the visual metaphors on which visual communication is based.

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To achieve this in pragmatic terms, I propose to use modes of interpreting the art object, visual art and communication derived from art history, which can also be seen to be part of the archaeological tradition: 1) formal analysis, what it looks like; and 2) analysing what it means (Alpers 1983, Arnold 2004, Gombrich 1950, 1960, 1979, Panofsky 1972, Sontag 1994). Formal analysis is based on aesthetic foundations – what it looks like – which is very much part of the archaeological tradition of how we interpret the object: is it big or small, what it is made of etc. By asking these descriptive questions we can follow the aesthetics, the visual tradition the object embodies. Is the tradition static or changing? What it is made from and how it is made? Is the object a unique example of such an aesthetic or a part of wider assemblage, or is this an object that we can trace as the first to capture the new aesthetics and that can indicate the arrival of new or different form of visual expression. The rest of this book proposes interpretations and explorations of art objects in this setting. The second kind of analysis focuses on the question of what it means. To address this, I employ post-processual ideas such as context, the active role of material culture, and use of visual culture in moderating identities from the individual to the collective. Furthermore, since material culture is not an independent entity in its own right, and is always negotiated and created via human action, I will focus on diverse forms of human visual expression in prehistory and their meanings. Using ideas that we utilise in interpreting the contemporary world, as well as the way non-western concepts developed in anthropology challenge our world order, I intend to relocate firmly prehistoric visual art and communication within human history, to build greater awareness about the richness and diversity of being human.

Summary Summarising this chapter, the approach taken in this book is to develop an understanding of visual art and visual communication as interwoven capacities of being human, where the meaning that culturally governed categories convey as visual metaphors are specific to particular cultures, ideologies or social relations, and are an essential part of interpretations and explorations of art objects. Exploring the relationships between the two disciplines of art history and archaeology, and the focus on the object and the artist, allows us to see the study of prehistoric material culture and archaeology as a discipline in its own right, part of the intellectual endeavour in studying and interpreting art objects where form is intrinsically linked with meaning. Furthermore, if we understand art as a process of both product and activity, outlined by Reed (2003) we can free ourselves from ethnographic analogies and focus on being human with differences and diversities created in different times and cultures.

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Janik, L. (2014). ‘Seeing visual narrative. New methodologies in the study of prehistoric visual depiction’, Archaeological Dialogues 21(1): 103–126. Jones, A. M. (2012). Prehistoric Materialities. Becoming Material in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jordanova, L. (2012). The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knappett, C. (2014). ‘Materiality in archaeological theory’, in C. Smith (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Global Archaeology, 4700–4708, New York: Springer. Knappett, K. (2005). Thinking through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Layton, R. (1991). The Anthropology of Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Layton, R. (2003). ‘Art and agency: A reassessment’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9: 447–464. Loze, I. A. (1979). Pozdny Neolit I Rannaya Bronza Lubanskoi Ravniny, Riga: Zinatne. Loze, I. A. (1983). Akmens laikmeta māksla Austrumbaltijā, Riga: Zinatne. Meskell, L., and R. Preucel (2004). A Companion to Social Archaeology, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. McBrearty, S., and A. S. Brooks (2000). ‘The revolution that wasn’t: A new interpretation of the origin of modern human behaviour’. Journal of Human Evolution 39: 453–563. doi:10.1006/jhev.2000.0435. Miklyayev, A. M. (1988). ‘The Hermitage Museum under water’, in Occasional Bulletin of the Hermitage Museum, 67–69, Leningrad: Hermitage Museum. Miller, D. (1987). Material Culture and Mass Consumption, Oxford: Blackwell. Miller, D. (2005). ‘Introduction’, in D. Miller (ed.), Materiality, 1–50, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mink, J. (2001). Marcel Duchamp, 1887–1968: Art as Anti-Art, Köln: Midpoint Press, TASCHEN GmbH. Moro Abadía, O. (2006). ‘Art, crafts and Paleolithic art’, Journal of Social Archaeology 6(1): 119-141. Moro Abadía, O., and M. R. González Morales (2010). ‘Redefining Neanderthals and art: An alternative interpretation of the multiple species model for the origin of behavioural modernity’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology 29(3): 229–243. Morphy, H. (2009). ‘Art as a mode of action: Some problems with Gell’s art and agency’, Journal of Material Culture 14(1): 5–27. Morphy, H., and M. Perkins (eds) (2006). The Anthropology of Art: A Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. Nalbantian, S. (2008). ‘Neuroaesthetics: Neuroscientific theory and illustration from arts’, Interdisciplinary Science Review 33(4): 357–368. Oshibkina, S. V. (1989). ‘The material culture of the Verete-type sites in the region of the East of lake Onega’, in C. Bonsall (ed.), The Mesolithic in Europe, 402–413, Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers Ltd. Panofsky, E. (1972). Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, New York: Harper and Row. Parker, R., and G. Pollock (1981). Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, London: Pandora Press. Pidd, H. (2011). ‘Overzealous cleaner ruins £690,000 artwork that she thought was dirty’, The Guardian, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/nov/03/overzealous-cleanerruins-artwork.

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Pollock, G. (1988). Vision and Difference. Femininity, Feminism and History of Art, London: Routledge. Preziosi, D. (ed.) (1998). The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Radivojević, M., J. Pendić, A. Srejić, M. Korać, C. Davey, A. Benzonelli, M. Martinón-Torres, and Ž. Kamberović (2017). ‘Experimental design of the Cu-AsSn ternary colour diagram’. Journal of Archaeological Science 90: 106–119. Reed, C. (2003). ‘Postmodernism and the art of identity’, in N. Stangos (ed.), Concepts of Modern Art, 271–293, London: Thames & Hudson Ltd. Rush, M. (1999). New Media in Late 20th-Century Art, London and New York: Thames and Hudson. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism, New York: Pantheon. Salomon, N. (1991). ‘The art historical canon: Sins of omission’, in J. E. Hartman and E. Messer-Davidow (eds), (En)gendering the Knowledge: Feminism in Academe, 344–355, Knoxvill: University of Tennessee Press. Sandler, I. (1996). Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s, New York: IconEditions. Sapwell, M., and L. Janik (2015). ‘Making community: Rock art and the creative acts of accumulation’, in H. M. V. Stebergløkken, R. Berge, E. Lindgaard, and H. Vangen Stuedal (eds), Ritual Landscapes and Borders within Rock Art Research, 47–58, Oxford: Archaeopress. Schapiro, M. (1998). ‘Style’, in D. Preziosi (ed.), The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, 143–149, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Soffer, O., and M. W. Conkey (1997). ‘Studying ancient visual cultures’, in M. W. Conkey, O. Soffer, D. Stratmann, and N. G. Jablonsky (eds), Beyond Art: Pleistocene Imager and Symbol, 1–16, Wattis Symposium Series in Anthropology, Memories of the California Academy of Sciences 23, San Francesco, CA: California Academy of Sciences. Sontag, S. (1994). Against Interpretation, London: Vintage. Sooke, A. (2013). ‘Ice Age Art at the British Museum’, The Telegraph, www.tele graph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/9847126/Ice-Age-at-the-British-Museum.html (accessed February 2013). Sørensen, M. L. S. (2015). ‘“Paradigm lost” – on the state of typology within archaeological theory’, in K. Kristiansen, L. Smejda, and J. Turek (eds), Paradigm Found: Archaeological Theory – Present, Past and Future. Essays in Honour of Evžen Neustupný, 84–94, Oxford: Oxbow Books. Strathern, M. (1988). The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia, Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press. Tanner, J., and R. Osborne (eds) (2007). Art’s Agency and Art History, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Tilley, C. (1991). Material Culture and Text, London: Routledge. Tilley, C. (1994). A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments, Oxford: Berg Publishers. Trigger, B. G. (2008). A History of Archaeology Thought, Second Edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Webmoor, T., and C. L. Witmore (2008). ‘Things are us! A commentary on human/things relations under the banner of a “social” archaeology’, Norwegian Archaeological Review 41 (1): 53–70.

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Westermann, M. (ed.) (2005). Anthropologies of Art, Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Zijlmans, K., and W. van Damme (eds) (2005). World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, Amsterdam: Valiz. Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christo_and_JeanneClaude#/media/File:Pont_Neuf_emballé_par_Christo_(1985).jpg (accessed June 2019). Clovis Culture. Wikimedia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Projectile_point_ types.png Doryphoros of Polykleitos. Wikimedia. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/com mons/b/b5/Doryphoros_MAN_Napoli_Inv6011-2.jpg Hall of Bulls, Lascaux Cave. archeologie.culture. http://archeologie.culture.fr/lascaux/fr (accessed June 2019). Metropolitan Museum of Art. rtmetmuseum.org (accessed October 2016). Nike of Samothrace. Wikimedia. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/ 5/5b/MNBA_Vitória_de_Samotracia.jpg/800pxMNBA_Vitória_de_Samotracia.jpg Oxford English Dictionary. oxforddictionaries.com (accessed October 2017). Sistine Chapel, Rome. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistine_Chapel#/ media/File:Sistina-interno.jpg (accessed June 2019). Tate. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/craig-martin-an-oak-tree-l02262 (accessed October 2017).

3 THE GALLERY Unveiling visual narrative

Introduction The aim of this chapter is to discuss the agency of seeing, establishing how visual narratives could be used in the social context of story-telling, remembering events and their participants. This is achieved by incorporating a number of methodological strands in the interpretation of prehistoric art based on the cognition of vision as well as both Western and non-Western visual traditions that challenge our ways of seeing. Such an approach, I suggest, can provide us with new methods and know how that lead to an understanding of intentionality in prehistoric art. This in turn leads us towards the idea of visual story-telling, and its use in the social context of the culture that created it. One outcome of such an approach is the formal deconstruction of composition, as proposed in the previous chapter. We will also ask how we can look at prehistoric art using our own modes of communication, and how can we use non-western visual imagery to explore past visual traditions as independent entities. As argued in previous chapters, the perception of vision depends on the way knowledge is generated, not only through the capacities of the human brain, but also through culturally and socially generated processes. The latter is one of the major aspects of seeing that makes a major difference to what and how we see. By exploring the perception of vision, I will present the way prehistoric artists constructed visual narratives as active images, where: 1) an image results from the artists’ self-portraiture/autonomous portraiture; 2) images served as visual narrative that allows a number of people to participate in story-telling about the same event; and 3) movement/kinetic art as an integral part of the visual narrative. This account requires visual analyses of prehistoric images going beyond the Western tradition of visual art, especially in terms of the relationship between the position of the viewer and the object viewed. Such an approach

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sets the ideas presented in this chapter in an archaeological framework where the question of how it looks informs the interpretations about what the objects and/or images could mean. While presenting the ideas in this chapter, I will concentrate on two types of visually based story-telling: one, where the story is conveyed via single visual story-telling/monophonic story-telling; and secondly, where multiple visual narratives are involved/polyphonic story-telling. Distinguishing between these two ways of story-telling will allow us to look into artists’ intentionality and to be guided visually from how it looks to what it can mean. It also challenges Western ways of seeing and interpreting what we see.

Self-portraiture as figurines and sculptures The body The first example of the agency of seeing, material culture and the position of the viewer is linked to the first sculptures created by Modern Humans on their arrival in Europe around 40,000 years ago. They are universally called ‘Venus’ figurines or statuettes (Figure 3.1), after the discovery of female images carved from limestone at Willendorf in Austria by Josef Szombaty in 1908 (Adavasio et al. 2007). The name itself was inspired by comparison of these prehistoric

Unknown artist, Willendorf, female figurine, c. 25,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

FIGURE 3.1

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figurines with images of Hottentot women (White 2003), and their large bodies are regarded as the opposite to the refined beauty of the Roman goddess of love, beauty and fertility, Venus. This comparison was not accidental, and indicated the evolutionary link often made between early Modern Humans in Europe and 19th century Hottentot communities, and what were regarded as unrefined representations of antiquity.

Agency of seeing The agency of the image is so strong that the creation of these images has been attributed to male carvers. The interpretation is strongly linked with 19th century evolutionary theory, in which the assumed male activity of hunting is given primary importance and where ‘the Hunt’, or equally ‘Fertility Magic’, was meant to ensure the abundance of next season’s game (e.g. Breuil 1952). This explanation incorporates the art, abounding as it does with representations of reindeer, bison, mammoth, horse, lions, ibex ‘hunting-by-man’ lifestyle. It also permitted identification of the ‘artists-men’ (Dobres 1992, Fritz et al. 2016). Still, today, some art historians have indulged in such an understanding of early European art, for example in the work of Onians (2008), as discussed in the Chapter 1. What, however, is more surprising is the persistence of androcentrism and heterocentrism going beyond the 19th century in treating these female Venus figurines as something to be fondled, as if some kind of ‘sex toys’. This is more explicitly expressed by art historians than archaeologists: ‘The whole figurines are shown in the round or in high relief and so respond to the palm of the hand in much the same way’ (Collins and Onians 1978: 13). As suggested by Dobres (1992), both authors, being male, implicitly assume that the figurines were made by men for men. The second example she uses is even more explicit: the bulging Venus figurines with enormous buttocks and pendulous breasts, along with vulva drawn on the cave walls were undoubtedly male art creations, for themselves or for other men … the drawings or carvings were made, touched, carved, and fondled by men. (Guthrie 1984: 62–63, in Dobres 1992) Archaeologists, although more subtle in their approach, still accept the agency of seeing the figurines in terms of how they look like a priori, and so repeat unquestioningly the 19th century idea of the ‘Mother Goddess’, where women are seen largely in terms of their reproductive capacity as fertility symbols (e.g. Conard 2009, Guthrie 2005, Mellars 2009, Porr 2010). The publication of McDermott’s (1996, McCoid and McDermott 1996) ground-breaking study introduced a new and challenging dimension to the study of the Venus figurines and the agency of seeing. McDermott gave the agency of viewing to the women whom, he argued, made the figurines as self-portraiture. Thus, they resulted from a different projection of seeing,

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reflecting the body seen by the women themselves, and not by someone else who was looking at them. The relationship between the viewer and the object of seeing therefore changed: from women being looked at, to the woman who looks at herself, as the object of being looked at. This leads to refocusing our interpretation of Venus figurines into the wider understanding of early European art.

Autogenous sculpture Looking at these figurines from the position of someone looking at the female body, we see an overweight woman with head bent as if looking down, so how it can be explained that this is not in fact what we see? This is linked to the clue of the projection or perspective from which an artwork is designed to be seen. To illustrate this further, let us first look at Antony Gormley’s sculptures, which are self-portraits, like the Venus figurines as proposed by McDermott. Gormley’s sculptures are created by body casts. First, a plaster cast of the artist’s body is created by his assistants and then they use this to produce an iron replica of the body (Figure 3.2). In this process the dimensions of the body are similar between the person and the sculpture, so Gormley’s body casts are accurate representations of Gormley’s actual body, while it is not the case with the Venus’s figurines. However, if we use the technique used by Palaeolithic artists, the projection will change, creating an altered sculpture of the otherwise ordinary body. This is achieved by carving what we see. For example, if we look at the picture of Gavin Turk lying down taken at an oblique angle, close to his feet, we see how unrealistically big his feet appear (Figure 3.3). They seem too large in proportion to the rest of his body. This is due to the projection of seeing, the distance and the angle between the feet and the viewer. This can be replicated by a quick experiment, easily undertaken by anyone, by placing one hand in front of the face. It will look large and out of proportion compared, for example, to a picture on the wall we are facing while looking at the hand. Distance plays a significant role in how we perceive the hand. It does not, however, reflect the measurable size of our hand. If we move the hand further from the face it becomes smaller, but the measurable size stays the same. Similarly, if a woman looks down at her body some parts will seem bigger or smaller, distorting real dimensions of her body, and this is what happens in the projection ‘captured’ in the Venus figurines. McDermott argued for the existence of: at least five or six primary vistas: (1) head and face, (2) superior anterior or upper frontal surface of body (Figure 2a, b), (3) inferior anterior or lower frontal surface of body, (4) inferior lateral or lower side surface of body (Figure 2c), and (5) inferior posterior surface of body, including (a) underthe arm views and (b) an over-the-shoulder view. (McDermott 1996: 237)

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FIGURE 3.2 Process of creating the sculpture: iron-casting process; a and b) obtaining the body shape; c) result of iron casting the plaster body. Antony Gormley, CRITICAL MASS II, 1995 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Cast iron 60 lifesize elements; dimensions variable Installation view, StadtRaum Remise, Vienna Photograph by Stephen White, London, © the artist temp image).

Each sculpture is created by putting together a number of viewpoints into one object creating a variety of projections that captured the female body in this specific way. McDermott’s suggestions have been further supported in experiments in which female life drawing students were asked to draw their own bodies (McDermott and Johnson 2013). As in the prehistoric sculptures, the top of the body is drawn as being larger than in the drawings done by someone else, and we see in some cases the tilting of the legs towards one side as in a number of Venus figurines (Figure 3.4). If we compare a female body as if photographed by the woman herself with the Venus figurines, we see a very strong resemblance between the projections used to create such images (Figure 3.5). On the right of the Figure 3.5b we can see the projection captured in the Lespugue figurine as if the artist herself had

FIGURE 3.3 Gavin Turk, Death of Che, 2000 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Private Collection/Bridgeman Images).

FIGURE 3.4 Unknown artist, Kostenki 1, complex 1, layer 1, female figurine, between c. 28,000 to 20,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

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Comparable projection on the female body: a) top – unknown artist, female figurine, Willendorf, c. 25,000 years old; bottom – Caucasian female, 26 years old, six months pregnant, average weight; b) top – unknown artist, female figurine, Lespugue, between c. 26,000 and 24,000 years old; bottom – Caucasian female, 30 years old, four months pregnant, average weight (all pictures redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: McDermott (1996)).

FIGURE 3.5

been looking down at her own body. It is the body of a ‘30-year-old Caucasian female, four months pregnant’ (McDermott 1996: 241). We can therefore acknowledge the person who carved this sculpture as an adult female, rather than young and overweight, and at a particular stage of pregnancy. The left part of Figure 3.5a shows the Willendorf figurine carved using the same projection, looking down on herself, alongside ‘a six-months-pregnant 26-year-old Caucasian female of average weight’ (McDermott 1996: 240). However, when we consider the Venus figurines without acknowledging the projections used in carving them, the agency of seeing is distorted, leading to a misunderstanding of the viewer’s position, what we see and who made them. The female figurines’ form can be summarized by the following observation on Cubist sculpture: ‘The knowledge of the object … is a complex sum of projections’ (Rivière in Hockney 2006: 196). Sculpting one’s own body is also interesting from a neuroaesthetic perspective: we recognize the bodies of others through our own bodies, by visualising them and making sense of their parts. The processes of embodiment and disembodiment that are discussed further in Chapter 5 are related to specific brain areas:

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the right inferior parietal lobe, the precuneus, the temporoparietal junction, the extrastriate body area (EBA), anterior insula and the occipital cortex, bilaterally as an area of the brain (Arzy et al. 2006a, 2006b, Astafiev et al. 2004, Candidi et al. 2012, Ferri et al. 2012, Sudo et al. 2012). This allows us to trace the neurophysiological relationship between being human and creative expression in art that spans many thousands of years (Figure 3.6). These two self-portraits could not look more different: the first is an overweight female with large breasts and stomach, while the second shows a lean, well-proportioned male. It is deceptive because the shape of each sculpture depends on the position of the viewer rather than the dimensions of the body. On the left (Figure 3.6a) is the Venus figurine from Kostenki 1, complex 2, and on the right we see the cast of Antony Gormley’s body (Figure 3.6b).

FIGURE 3.6 a) unknown artist, Kostenki 1, complex 2, female figurine, between c. 28,000 to 20,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny); b) Antony Gormley, Reflection, 2001 at 350 Euston Road, London (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

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Experiential art and autogenous sculpture One more example that supports the idea of women being the first artists whose gender we can recognize is one of the earliest female figurines known, from Hohle Fels in Germany, dated to over 35,000 thousand years ago (Conard 2009). This piece was carved from one piece of mammoth ivory, seemingly served as a pendant, and is an image of an overweight woman (Figure 3.7). The agency of seeing here can be altered again by seeing it as transcending the representation of reproductive capacities and fertility. According to Morriss-Kay (2012: 1590–1591) the 6 cm figurine made out of mammoth ivory represents a ‘somatosensory self-portraiture’ of a woman who recently gave birth. An obstetrician, Morriss-Kay bases her idea on the way women’s bodies look and feel after the changes related to the physiological and mental alterations linked to giving birth to a stillborn child: Her breasts are engorged with milk: their gradual enlargement during pregnancy has not prepared her for the sudden shock and discomfort of lactiferous engorgement. They feel unfamiliarly tight and enormous, hence their exaggerated size and raised position. Her belly, having enlarged gradually during pregnancy and having contained an active child, is suddenly empty.

Unknown artist, Hohle Fels, female figurine, c. 35,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

FIGURE 3.7

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She is aware of the loss from it of the child she was carrying. Although her belly is still somewhat swollen, the skin is now far too big, and wrinkled, hence the transverse striations firmly engraved into the ivory. The size and gash-like form of the vulva (which she has not herself seen) suggests considerable discomfort, probably arising from a perineal tear. Even taking into account the possibility of a torn perineum, the size of the vulva is visually unrealistic, but it makes complete sense when interpreted as the externalised expression of somatosensory information-processing. (Morriss-Kay 2012: 1590–1591) In describing stillbirth, Morriss-Kay points out the following clues: The postpartum bodily changes are the same after a stillbirth as after a live birth, including lactiferous engorgement of the breasts a few days after the birth. The circumferential lines carved around the prominent breasts suggest a sensation of tightness unrelieved by suckling, as does the absence of clearly depicted nipples. (Morriss-Kay 2012: 1592) The small head of the figurine that serves as a loop for the pendant is explained by Morriss-Kay as a further indication of ‘somatosensory self-portraiture’, in which the body rather than the head takes priority in the experience of childbirth and the bodily consequences of stillbirth. The agency of seeing is very strong here. But we can only see it if we know about the experience of stillbirth or have participated in it. As with the Venus figurines, those who simply describe what they see have no reference to what they are looking at, and that in turn leads to a misunderstanding. I suggest that instead, the Hohle Fels figure is an example of experiential art – even if somewhat different to those mentioned in Chapter 1. The similarity lies in relying on the shared principle of being able to convey one’s own experience in the creative act of producing imagery as part of visual communication.

Gallery of seeing 2D story-telling To achieve the desired result, the artist relies on their experiences in the creation of art where the agency of seeing transports the viewer to a particular event (Janik 2015, Janik et al. 2007), perhaps through story-telling. A number of examples come to mind. For example, many gallery spaces are arranged by presenting individual artists, themes or in chronological progression. In Christian churches, in particular Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran, we can see the Stations of the Cross composed of 14 separate images, which, one by one, visually communicate the last day in Christ’s life before he was crucified. If we follow the

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whole sequence (they are numbered), we can trace his movement through Jerusalem as if we were part of the story of Jesus Christ and his suffering. We experience him being condemned to death, and while he is carrying the cross we are told about a number of events at each Station. At the end we see him crucified and, after his death, laid out in the tomb (Figure 3.8). The sequence of the story is followed by churchgoers during Lent, in particular during Good Friday before Easter, when attendants physically move through the church from one Station of the Cross to the next. They make the journey with the Cross alongside Jesus and pray, along with a priest, for the salvation and resurrection of Jesus Christ and for themselves through him.

Agency of seeing and 2D visual narrative In more secular contexts, artists can be very disappointed when the exhibition curator takes liberties and does not follow the artist’s lead about how the exhibits should be displayed to communicate the message the artist wants to convey via his or her art. This disappointment was expressed by Annie Leibowitz when interviewed by Anna Beata Bohdziewicz in January 1998: With all the respect to Marek [Grygiel] I think it was hanged not well. I gave Marek a map to follow, a legend … Some of the pictures were never meant to be so spread out, they were meant to be seen as a grouping. For

FIGURE 3.8 Stations of the Cross, the story-telling of Jesus Christ’s last day in Jerusalem (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Stations of the Cross. Wikipedia).

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example: the pictures of my family were always designed to be like on a family wall, they were supposed to be together. It was supposed to copy my mother’s wall in her house, it’s always hung that way. They need each other, they mean to be close to each other so that you could look at them just in one glance. I am also particularly sensitive to how Sarajevo hangs. I wanted Sarajevo in there but I didn’t want it to take over because it is not my intention to have it so dark in feeling, in tone. The Sarajevo pictures were always supposed to be a block. Here in the exhibition they are too spread. I feel very proud of the work from the eighties, because it is very bright and colourful, but I was balancing it with this later work. I was trying to counteract all the very popular work and I think I made it a little too dark. It is a little too down in feeling and I wish it edited a little more positive. Also each place it hangs it looks different and I always thought there should be some doubling up. Especially at the end where there are portraits and they look better hanging all together. It’s confusing, the way it is hung. It’s supposed to be chronological but it’s really not. It is very hard to understand. Mentally there is a lot of material there and you are supposed to look at it differently. (Bohdziewicz 1998) Reading this quote we can see the way Leibovitz constructed the narrative of her exhibition: how she has been telling the story via her photography; how colour plays a part in conveying the meaning; and the importance of the ‘agency of seeing’. By grouping images together and giving them a sense of proximity or separation, the artist invites us to look in a particular way, to focus on the story rather than on diverse images that are not intended to be seen on their own, but in the contexts of the others. If one breaks this relationship and focuses on each individual image without paying regard to the visual storytelling, the meaning disappears and the pictures revert to only being pictures, painted or photographed by famous artists like Leibowitz. But the message they carry is missing. Similarly, when we look at prehistoric imagery, we can see the intentionality of the artist who placed particular images or scenes in relation to each other to construct the visual story in the same way as done by Leibovitz. Following the intentionality of prehistoric artists by looking at the process of accumulation and separation in the way images were carved into the rock surface between Laxön at Nämforsen dated to c. 6,200–3,200 years ago in northern Sweden, and Zalavruga, in the White Sea region, Russia dated to c. 5,600–3,600 years ago, we have established a contrasting visual vocabulary of rock art between the regions and the meanings they carry (Sapwell 2014, Sapwell and Janik 2015). By looking at the distance and associations between human images and scooped elk motifs, it becomes apparent that human beings do not appear on their own, but instead they are always associated with scooped elk and other humans, implying emphasis on the group rather than the individual. The scooped elk, where the whole body has been pecked out in contrast to the

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outline, is the most popular image and the most shared visual vocabulary between communities of the region, as if encapsulating shared meaning between different communities. This unifying image gives the sense of both sharing and belonging at once. In contrast, the image uniquely related to Nämforsen, the fish, occurs in isolation, outside the clusters of humans and scooped elks, in a way that is particular to this specific community and not shared with others, something outside the regional meaning defined by the scooped elk. The agency of seeing here emphasises community and wider regional associations between groups, with the individual moved to the margin of the visual narrative. In contrast, at Zalavruga the images emphasize the individual in scenes of marine and/or terrestrial hunting (Figures 1.22, 1.24). Where the individuals are engaged in a number of activities they are carved in such a way that we can recognize their bodies’ attributes: the bodies are realistically carved, going beyond the stick depictions of humans at Nämforsen. Figure 3.9 shows two contrasting images: one from Sweden (Figure 3.9b) where we can see rather static human figures without any individual attributes; and the second from Russia (Figure 3.9a), in which easily recognisable features of men’s body shape, beard and hair styles are shown. At Zalavruga, however, carvings of elk, the most commonly shared image in this region, are often placed outside complex compositions. The agency of seeing here leads us to focus on the activities performed by individuals, a specific form of imagery unique to Zalavruga, while the shared image of the elk is often placed outside this visual narrative. Recognising the agency of seeing – as in these examples, the way images were placed to create visual narratives – gives us the opportunity to trace the intentionality of prehistoric artists and to engage in a new way with prehistoric art. Images and the spaces in which they are displayed give many artists the opportunity to engage with story-telling through their creations. An excellent

a) unknown artist, Zalavruga rock art carvings, between c. 5,600 and 3,600 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny); b) unknown artist, Nämforsen rock art, between c. 6,200 and 3,200 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

FIGURE 3.9

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example of this was the exhibition by David Hockney at the Royal Academy of Arts, A Bigger Picture, London, January–April 2012: … very ambitious works have slowly emerged: the very large painting that sprang from Claue’s wonderful Sermon on the Mount in the Frick Collection in New York City; a work comprising 51 iPad drawings and very large paintings, all describing the arrival of spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire, in 2001: and the 18-screen videos we made in 2010 and 2011. All are new, and would not have been conceived without the offer of the Royal Academy’s splendid rooms. (Hockney 2012: 22) The images included in this exhibition are his works focusing on landscape, where the use of both old and new technologies allowed him on the one hand to engage and, on the other, to transcend traditional landscape painting. In his landscapes Hockney uses different types of perspective and viewpoint, approaches that were also used in prehistory, allowing us to read the visual narrative as a story told by different participants. If we think about the neurophysiological capacities required for this, they are comparable to those needed to make sense of seeing action stills from a film.

Landscape In the case of Venus figurines, the agency of seeing incorporated a number of projections into a 3D image. Here, however, I discuss the agency of seeing within 2D imagery. This challenges our understanding of visual narrative and leads to unexpected discoveries regarding prehistoric artists’ visual story-telling. The agency of seeing in this context relies on the way our brain visualises motion and how we have learned to understand pictures through the Renaissance-inspired tradition of seeing. As discussed in Chapter 1, our brain perceives motion as both something that physically moves and something that exhibits movement. Motion is composed of dynamic information conveying the location/s of the object in relation to the observer. This capacity for understanding and predicting the location of any particular object in time and space allows us to make sense of static pictures, as presented in Chapter 1. We comprehend through the cognition of vision static images of action as a depiction of something and/or someone in movement, where the V5 and MST regions of our brains play a vital part. PET scans show that when a subject, seated in a room, imagines they are at their front door and starts to walk either to the left or the right, activation begins in the visual association cortex, the parietal cortex, and the prefrontal cortex – all higher cognitive processing centres of the brain. (Ratey 2002: 107)

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The implication of this discovery is significant since if we look at the picture someone has taken of us walking in the landscape or museum, we can visualise the landscape and the museum space before and after this picture was taken (Kourtzi and Kanwisher 2000, Proverbio et al. 2009). Furthermore, if we were vigorously walking while the picture was taken by looking at it our body will recreate the exercise itself (Proverbio et al. 2009). If we consider those findings, our understanding of the prehistoric art becomes much more integrated between the image and the action it depicts. I present this by discussing rock carvings created by prehistoric fisher-gatherer-hunters in Karelia, c. 6,000–3,600 years ago.

Story-telling in 3D To unveil the agency of seeing we need to first look at the way we understand our own tradition of seeing 2D images by looking at two basic concepts in Western art history: station points/viewpoints and picture plane (Janik 2015). Looking at any particular composition as an independent visual narrative, we can at first focus on how it is formally structured: what does it look like? The question of ‘what does it mean?’ is secondary. To pre-empt a frequently asked question, namely how do I know what the specific composition looked like when it was created, I concentrate here on the ‘end product’. I mean by this that it could be created by various carvers who, over time, added to the original, and what we see now is the ‘end product’. The composition discussed below was carved some 4,500 years ago (Janik 2010) and is a part of the New Zalavruga rock art complex. The images that make up Group VIII cover about 7 m2, and were carved on a slight slope, creating an ideal viewing platform allowing the viewer to see the group without any obstructions (Figure 3.10).

FIGURE 3.10 Unknown artist, Zalavruga rock art carvings, whale hunt, c. 4,500 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

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The scene represents a marine hunting event in which a large whale is hunted by six boats, each of which is attached to the whale by harpoon. Adjacent to the right fin of the whale is another smaller whale, which seems to be swimming alongside the larger one (Figure 3.11). The boats differ in both their size and the number of people they carry. Below the boats are two carvings showing possible spears (on the left side) and two complete and one partial depiction of bears. As the eye moves across the scene from left to right the viewer observes two carvings of humans, above the boat on the furthest right, who look to be standing one behind the other. Continuing to the right of the marine hunting scene, we see another boat containing two people, to the right of which is a geometric figure. Just below this is a further carved figure of a human being, just above whose right hand is another small boat. The element furthest to the right of the composition is a smaller and longer boat of apparently different proportions to the others. Other animals in the scene include a young elk, two water birds (probably swans) with their footprints also depicted, three bears placed one after another, and a deer carved above a human figure with a bow and arrow. It is a complex composition combining marine and terrestrial hunting scenes that at first glance is somewhat confusing, but if we start to look at it from a formal viewpoint, both sets of activities become relevant to the visual storytelling and to those who were telling the story.

FIGURE 3.11 Unknown artist, Zalavruga rock art carvings, whale hunt, c. 4,500 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

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Thus, we can see that one way to visually engage with and deconstruct the image is to employ two key concepts in the visual expression; station point/ viewpoint and picture plane (Janik 2015). These serve as heuristic devices in visually unravelling both prehistoric and contemporary visual narratives.

Moving in the landscape One of the milestones in the development of our understanding of visual narrative was the recognition of viewpoints based on the relationship between the observer and the observed, and their relative location in space.

Viewpoint Viewpoint defines the position of the artist/viewer and the persons, items or landscape painted/looked at (Hagen 1986). It allows us to locate ourselves in space in relation to what we are looking at. By looking straight ahead we view an object in front of us. This changes when we have more than one viewpoint and when we leave traditional Renaissance projections and enter Cubism. As Hockney writes after Jacques Rivière: Perspective is as accidental a thing as lighting. It movement in time, but of a particular position the situation of the object, but the situation of the final analysis, perspective is also the sign of when a certain man is at a certain point.

is sign not of a particular in space. It indicates not a spectator … hence, in an instant, of the instant (Hockney 2006: 196)

This point is well illustrated by Bond’s sculpture Anamorphic Man, where he implicitly engages with our ability to make sense of visual embodiment and

FIGURE 3.12 Viewing the sculpture from a 0˚ viewpoint and from a 240˚ viewpoint. Jim Bond, Anamorphic Man, 2009, photography by John Coombes (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Courtesy of the artist. © Jim Bond).

Three pictures with one viewpoint. a) (Medieval) – unknown artist, King John of England, c. 15th (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: King John of England. Wikipedia); b) (Renaissance) – Pieter Bruegel the Younger, The Creek, c. second half of 16th century (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: The Creek. Wikimedia.WGA3632.jpg); c) (Contemporary) – Leiko Ikemura, Lago with a lying figure, 2009 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Courtesy of the artist. © Leiko Ikemura).

FIGURE 3.13

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FIGURE 3.14 Henri Matisse, The Inattentive Reader, 1919 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Artwork in its original form: © Succession H. Matisse/DACS 2019).

disembodiment as mentioned in Chapter 1. If we look straight ahead at the sculpture by standing in front of it, we will see the whole individual, while if we move to look at it from 240˚ we will only see the elements of the human figure (Figure 3.12). This sculpture illustrates very well how formal deconstruction of the image depends on the place we are standing. When we view an object from various viewpoints we see different dimensions of the same sculpture. Most Medieval, Renaissance and contemporary art shares one viewpoint. The viewer is standing in one place looking at the object, landscape or action unveiled in front of him or her. The agency of viewing here depends on a straightforward relationship between the viewer and the viewed. The viewer is in one place and time looking at the image: the visual narrative is structured in such a way that only one story is told, the story of the viewer (Figure 3.13). The image from the Medieval period displays the knight accompanied by the dog; in this case the King, hence the crown, is pursuing the deer (Figure 3.13a); Renaissance farmers walking by the creek and standing on the bridge that crosses it, with a watermill and large house in the background and a tree that dominates the composition created by Pieter Breughel (Figure 3.13b).

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Diego Rivera, Young Man with a Fountain Pen, 1914 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: © Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./DACS 2019).

FIGURE 3.15

The contemporary image by Leiko Ikemura conveys a dreamy landscape with hills visible across the water, the scene is flanked by the woman in the left corner and the part of the lion’s head in the right (Figure 3.13c), all images share the same principle in which the artist has created the image in a way that there is only one viewer who looks at the picture at this particular time and from this particular viewpoint. A number of different viewpoints were introduced to modern art in the early 20th century. The viewer was now looking at the same object, scene or landscape from different viewpoints by being present in different places at the same time. Good examples can be found in the works of Henri Matisse (Figure 3.14). In The Inattentive Reader, the viewer is looking at a woman. The single viewer is in two places at once: firstly looking at her sitting in the armchair, and secondly looking at the tilted table. The angle of the table is reinforced by floor lines giving our eyes a visual clue as to the tilted table. This way of seeing was fully developed by Cubist artists (Figure 3.15).

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Certainly, reality shows us those objects mutilated in this way. But in reality, we can change positions: a step to the right, a step to the left completes our vision. The knowledge of the object … is a complex sum of projections. (Rivière in Hockney 2006: 196) This unique way of seeing is challenging not only because it demands us to look at one object from different viewpoints at the same time and make sense of what we see, but it also requires from us not to rely on the more familiar Renaissance style projection. Looking at Young Man with a Fountain Pen by Diego Rivera, we can see the complexity of the projections we are viewing at the same time: the head in a hat, torso represented by the jacket, the shirt and the bowtie. The number of superimposed images reflects the number of viewpoints, as if we were seeing the projections moving through 270˚. We start with the head and body being seen from the side and finish with the head and torso facing us, while in between the starting and finishing point we see a number of other projections. The viewpoints used allow us to be in a number of places at the same time, we visually ‘travel’ in space but not time. When we see 3D objects from all sides and directions simultaneously, it is as if the viewer is in different places at the same time. From the neurophysiological standpoint this is not a very successful strategy for visual communication since our brains need time. This is the reason Cubist projections of objects (Zeki 1999) or landscapes (Janik 2014) are not so successful. We comprehend only 10% of information entering our brain via our eyes, and thus making sense of what is seen usually requires the artist to rely on simpler projections. If we compare Braque’s Houses at L’Estaque we can immediately see whose composition is more comprehensible to the human brain. Despite Houses at L’Estaque being a Cubist picture in which elements can be seen from different viewpoints, the overall composition still relies on the Renaissance projection: the walls and roofs of the houses, the trees’ branches and leaves are all structured to lead our eyes in one direction. Viewpoints and prehistoric rock art White arrows have been added to the previous figures to indicate the position/ viewpoint of the viewer, and we can use the same method to indicate viewpoints in prehistoric rock art carvings (Figure 3.16). When we do so, we realise how many viewpoints are utilised in the carving from Zalavruga, creating a complex multi-viewpoint composition only comparable to Cubist depictions of an object. By looking at viewpoints we can see how the artist alters their location by moving from one position to another, so the location from which each depiction was intended to be seen can be traced. If we turn to the formal analysis of Group VIII at Zalavruga, removing it from its context on the rock surface, there appears to be no single position from which the viewer is intended to begin looking at the composition. The multiple viewpoints encourage us to look at the composition in 360˚ at once. This differs

FIGURE 3.16 Unknown artist, Zalavruga rock art carvings, whale hunt, c. 4,500 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

Unknown artist, Zalavruga rock art carvings, c. 4,500 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

FIGURE 3.17

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from the composition of Group VIIIa (Figure 3.17), where the three boats with the prows in the shape of elk heads, one with an individual sitting at the front, are seen from three viewpoints spanning 230˚. As I have shown elsewhere (Janik 2015), Cubism is the movement in modern Western art that produces the closest visual parallels to these types of prehistoric rock art (Figure 3.18). Prehistoric art, and in this particular case Karelian rock art, challenges our traditional understanding of what and how we see, deserving acknowledgement as an independent tradition of perspective and form of presenting motion in past societies.

Scenes from the first movie/visualisation available on the www.arch.cam. ac.uk/directory/lj102 (created by Katarzyna Szczę sna, Krzysztof Danilewski with Liliana Janik 2017, using AutoCAD and 3D Studio).

FIGURE 3.18

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In trying to understand the narrative presented in the composition of the whale hunt at Zalavruga, the researchers utilised film as the best medium to allow the viewer to be stationary while different elements of the composition were unveiled sequentially. The movie is shown here as a number of clips, each capturing a moment (www.arch.cam.ac.uk/directory/lj102), we however are looking at only what is visible in a particular moment by one person only. The online availability of these films allows us to experience the visualisation of prehistoric rock art in a contemporary medium as part of the Western visual tradition (Figure 3.18). This medium introduces a third dimension to what is otherwise a 2D image. To fully understand this process we need to look at non-Western visual traditions.

Picture plane The second cardinal visual clue that can help us to deconstruct formally the visual narrative is the picture plane. The picture plane is a pretend surface in the picture on which the action (what is happening) and its participants are located (Hagen 1986). Hagen’s (1986: 121) picture showing the gradients of two picture planes illustrates very well the easiest way to find the picture plane. Picture planes are marked on the illustrations below by black arrows. In the case of the Medieval, Renaissance and contemporary examples, the picture plane is aligned with a single viewpoint and provides us with the overlapping of both cardinal visual clues so strong in the Western visual tradition (Figure 3.19). Matisse’s painting, The Inattentive Reader, illustrates a picture plane that does not follow previous examples and is described by Hagen in terms of the angulation (Figure 3.20a). This is achieved through the difference in the angle of the view of the table and floor. The same technique is used by Japanese artists illustrating The Tale of Genji, who made use of two viewpoints, as did Matisse (Figure 3.20b). One viewpoint is directly in front of the viewer, while the second is positioned at an angle to the picture plane. The first viewpoint focuses on the people who are the subject of the composition but, by including a second viewpoint, we are able to comprehend all the activities depicted without need to be at different ‘places’ at the same time, as we were required to figure out the Cubist picture. A similar principle is used in ancient Egypt art (Figure 3.21). The elements of the composition are presented from the viewpoint directly in front of the viewer as is most common in the Western tradition. However, in the case illustrated here the picture plane is seen from the top and all sides at the same time, acting to ‘flatten’ out the picture. The viewpoint from which the brick makers and the lotus flowers are seen in the picture is directly in front or at 0˚. The elements of the picture plane such as trees can be said to equal 360˚, but what is important is the viewer is not looking at the scene but he or she are in the scene. They are facing each row of trees at once as if standing on the water in the middle of the pond looking at four directions at once.

Three pictures with one picture plane. a) (Medieval) – unknown artist, King John of England, c. 15th (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: King John of England. Wikipedia); b) (Renaissance) – Pieter Bruegel the Younger, The Creek, c. second half of 16th century (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: The Creek. Wikimedia); c) (Contemporary) – Leiko Ikemura, Lago with a lying figure, 2009 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Courtesy of the artist. © Leiko Ikemura).

FIGURE 3.19

a) Henri Matisse, The Inattentive Reader, 1919 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Artwork in its original form: © Succession H. Matisse/DACS 2019); b) Tosa Mitsuoka, The Tale of Genji – The Bluebell, between 1617–1692 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: The Tale of Genji. Wikipedia).

FIGURE 3.20

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Brick makers getting water from a pool, tomb of Rekhmir, 18th dynasty between c. 2,549/3,550 to 3,292 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Brick makers. Wikimedia).

FIGURE 3.21

Furthermore, an additional viewpoint is located above the scene from which we can see the pond where the water ripples create the zig zag pattern fishing. Ancient Egyptian artists (Figure 3.21) worked out this projection by introducing a viewpoint located above the seen object (the aerial viewpoint-white star), rather than by tilting the picture plane as in the Western visual tradition. The way the formal configuration of the composition was produced reflects a separate tradition that again allows us to see in different picture planes at one time, as in the medium of film. The picture plane and prehistoric rock art Returning to New Zalavruga and the scene depicted in Group VIII of the Karelian rock art carvings (Figure 3.22), there is an absence of a clear picture plane and elements such as whales, shown from the aerial viewpoint used in ancient Egyptian art. This new dimension in prehistoric art presents challenges to the contemporary viewer, unfamiliar with their own visual paradigm, but nonetheless allows the viewer an insight into the prehistoric carver’s intentions. The second visualisation was constructed through introducing an aerial viewpoint, encouraging the consideration of non-Western ways of constructing a visual

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FIGURE 3.22 Unknown artist, Zalavruga rock art carvings, whale hunt, c. 4,500 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

composition (Figure 3.23). As in the case of the first visualisation, a few clips from a short movie have been selected to illustrate this book. This cinematic presentation allows the viewer to explore the visual narrative by making visible multiple elements of the composition at once. The film alters the nature of the viewers’ participation, presenting multiple voices and viewpoints, each a slightly different story, since during the ‘moment captured’ the event is observed from different viewpoints. The culturally defined way the visual narrative is conveyed allows different participants to contribute, and participation is not restricted only to one person. The cinematic visualisation adopts aspects of the Western visual tradition in its employment of viewpoint and picture plane, yet at the same time accommodates ‘non Western’ ways of seeing. Ancient Egyptian art posits a different form of visual communication and in turn enables the prehistoric composition to be seen as part of a unique visual tradition, different to ours, yet one that can be made recognisable to us through the medium of film. Through this medium of seeing, Group VIII (whale hunt) can begin to be understood in terms of its visual narrative and story-telling. There are many participants in the visual narrative and many station points, and the multivocality of the story telling in the image is revealed. Through the activation of V5 and MST we see the ‘moments captured’ in the rock art of Karelia. The static images shown in the whale hunt carved by prehistoric carvers imply motion to the viewer and bring together the intentionality of the artist and prehistoric visual perception into our sphere of seeing.

Scenes from the second movie/visualisation available on the www.arch. cam.ac.uk/directory/lj102 (created by Katarzyna Szczę sna, Krzysztof Danilewski with Liliana Janik 2017, using AutoCAD and 3D Studio).

FIGURE 3.23

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Agency of seeing and 3D visual narrative Using the methodology presented above, that mixes Western and non-Western ways of deconstructing visual narrative, provides a way to access the composition, and the implication of such for seeing the story that is unveiling in front of our eyes. Combining viewpoints and picture plane represents a visually captured instant in particular space and time. If we add to this the location (on the rock surface in the case of rock art) as a visual platform, we can start to move from ‘what does it look like’ to ‘what does it mean’. In the case of rock art, at Zalavruga the carver has used these combinations of viewpoints and picture planes to present a story told by different peoples, animals and whales in the same moment in time. As I have argued above, we see at first, and at once, the most important image: here the most eye-catching element is the whale in the middle. The humans shown participating in the marine and terrestrial hunting scenes, are given equal participation in visual story-telling and we may conclude equal ownership of the story. The sense given by the multiple picture planes suggests that no one actor is more important than another, hinting at concern for equality. The visual story is about the whale and the boats, but not the people who are hunting. The humans both on and outside the boats, the bears, elks and birds are all of equal visual standing. The amalgamation of different locations/view points in the landscape/picture plane can by summarized as polyphonic story-telling, where narrative is built up by various people contributing to the narrative/polyphony. This contrasts with the traditional Western construction of visual narrative which is based on one voice/ monophony relying on a single viewpoint. Polyphonic/multi-vocal story-telling, where the images represent different voices is not a part of the Western tradition of visual composition construction. It is, however, present in the literature of late 19th and early 20th century, used by writers such as Dostoevky (Bakhtin 1984) and, probably better known to use this style of narrative, Stein (Brickey 2012, Lesinska 1998). If we imagine people from different boats and places recalling the event of this hunt, we are placed visually at various viewpoints or locations in the landscape, which in turn allows everyone who was doing other things and not hunting whales to add their story to this image. Because it is not about the hunt per se, the beluga whale is too small to be hunted by all those boats. In reality six boats of various sizes cannot all be involved in hunting a beluga whale at the same time because the beluga whale is too small, just the size of a dolphin. Furthermore, the location of harpoons indicates the act of towing the creature towards land rather than hunting. So, what we see here is the whale as a focus for the number of stories that enter into the narrative by being added to by different people, and thus creating the plurality or multivocality of the event. The activation of brain areas V5 and MST as part of seeing (Kourtzi and Kanwisher 2000, Proverbio et al. 2009), and the dynamic relationship between the seen object and particular viewer in the ‘moment captured’, make motion a key concept in understanding the social and cultural aspects of any visual narrative.

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When we move from the question of ‘what rock art composition looks like’, to ‘how it informs us in interpreting prehistoric rock art’, we can see that: 1) Composition VIII is not about hunting but towing; 2) it is not a real event; 3) it includes a number of individuals and occurrences during the scene of towing carved into the rock. To hunt a whale in reality is a complex undertaking. It comprises ‘attracting, killing, butchering, transforming the animal into food and clothing (which attracts), and following the proper rituals …’ (Bodenhorn 1990: 64). Furthermore, in the case of hunting a beluga whale, silence must be observed since belugas are easily frightened if they detect unfamiliar sounds. Hunting them therefore needs to be conducted via physical signalling rather than use of voice. Even if we do not rely on ethnographic and/or historical evidence of rites or rituals associated with the whale hunt, we can safely say that practical activities related to whale hunting are numerous. The activities prior to killing the whale that take place on the sites involve a number of members of the community, including those who mend and prepare the nets and harpoons, tend the boats, make and repair clothing, and those who afterwards help to tow the whale, cut it, share the meat, cook it, store the meat, and turn the skin into materials for clothing and bones into tools. If we understand the hunt as a complex enterprise conducted by a number of community members in which the kill itself is part of the whole process rather than an exclusive episode, we start to understand that rock carving and the use of polyphonic narrative allows the presence of various community members in scenes of the ‘moments captured’. They may be ‘somewhere else’, for example hunting deer, since they have already contributed to the whale hunt prior to or after the event, perhaps contributing to towing the whale to the shore. What the rock art shows us are the locations of individuals involved in the hunt at this particular time and space, since through their actions before and/or after the kill they are part of the hunt itself. I suggest that the link between how we comprehend movement in neurophysiological terms and the way the composition is constructed is vital when we ask ‘who is this story about’ or ‘who took part in the story’, i.e. on whom society focuses and who is important. In a story like that depicted in Group VIII, the people who took part in terrestrial or marine hunting are equal participants in the visual narrative, taking a part and telling the story. This polyphonic or multi-vocal story-telling by different individuals is part of the agency of seeing, as discussed above in the context of Zalavruga, in which there is a stress on visualising the actions of individuals. It is not, however, the story told by one person or a singularity of visual narrative as in our own visual tradition.

Kinetic art The last example in this chapter is linked with the agency of seeing when the viewer is engaged with visual narrative through the use of perceived and actual movement, as in Kinetic art. In terms of neurophysiology and neuroaesthetics this is one of the aspects of visual communication located in the V5 area of the visual region of the brain (see Chapter 1, Figure 2.9): ‘the brain has devoted an entire set

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of areas of specialised processing systems to handling motion’ (Zeki 1999: 143). Seeing motion, however, is not restricted to the V5 areas, and for this we also rely on other regions of the visual cortex such as V1 and V3. As summarised by Barrett in 1970, Kinetic art differs from the simple representation of movement. Kinetic art movement is an integral part of the visual narrative (Stangos 2003: 212–224). This is different from Op art, where the image seems to move as the result of the use of optical illusion, rather than something moving in real space and time, and brain activity is not restricted to area V5 but also uses V1 to create images outside movement (Zeki 1999: 163). The development of Kinetic art is linked with the early 20th century rejection of established modes within the visual arts. Certain elements within Kinetic art, however, can already be seen in art from over 30,000 years ago. Although not called Kinetic art as such, it is termed ‘pre-echo cinema’ by the leading French archaeologist M. Azéma (Azéma 2005, Azéma and Rivère 2012). I suggest that use of the term Kinetic art better expresses the dynamism, movement and use of visual illusion to which the contemporary viewer can relate. The Kinetic art label/identifier is used here as a heuristic device which, on one hand, sets the images within a particular visual culture genre, while on the other allows the viewer to draw on the visual parallel in modern and contemporary art. In particular, elements familiar in Kinetic art are found in Palaeolithic art where movement is an integral part of the visual narrative and the visual narrative per se.

Kinetic art as a visual illusion Examples of Kinetic art from the Palaeolithic period come from two different contexts: the Aurignacian (between c. 37,000 and 27,000 thousand years ago) and Gravettian periods (between c. 32,000 and 16,000 years ago); and the Magdalenian period (between c. 17,000 and 12,000 thousand years ago). In the first period much of the continent of Europe was covered by ice and had an extremely cold climate, while in the later period the ice cap started to melt, allowing fauna and flora to expand north. In both periods Kinetic art was produced in the context of cave art as well as mobile art on portable items.

Movement as the superimposition of a sequence of events Azéma (Azéma 2011, Azéma and Rivère 2012) has identified a number of cases representing a sequence of events, in which animals are depicted ‘moving’ their legs (Figure 3.24), head or tail. The impression of movement is produced by superimposing a sequence of events as if the actions of the animal were divided into a succession of particular actions or body movements, moment by moment, sequence by sequence. The eight-legged bison carved on the wall of Chauvet Cave, France is probably the earliest example of Kinetic art known to us (Figure 3.26). A similar sequence of legs is traced on a stone slab deposited at the La Marche rock shelter, also in France (Figure 3.25).

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FIGURE 3.24 Split action movement created by superimposition of a sequence of events. Unknown artist, Chauvet Cave, eight-legged bison, between c. 32,000 and 26,000 years old (redrawn and amended by Szczę sny after: Eight-legged bison, Chauvet Cave. archeologie.culture).

FIGURE 3.25 Split action movement created by superimposition of a sequence of events. Unknown artist, La Marche, horse, c. 15,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Azéma 2015).

Here, however, the horse not only ‘moves’ its legs but also its head and tail. We can count five or six legs, an equal number of heads and two tails.

Movement as a juxtaposition of successive events A second way of showing movement in Palaeolithic art is well illustrated by the ‘swimming deer’ from Lascaux, France, where we see the juxtaposition of

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Split action movement created by juxtaposing successive images. Unknown artist, Lascaux Cave, swimming deer, between c. 17,000 and 15,000 year old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Swimming deer, Lascaux Cave. Wikimedia).

FIGURE 3.26

successive events. Here, however, the events are not shown by multiple views of one animal’s limbs, but by the sequential representations of one part of the body reflecting the action of swimming (Figure 3.25). Similar depictions of movement can be found on a number of portable artefacts (Azéma 2005, 2011). Returning to the image of the horse on the stone slab at La Marche, an impression of movement can be achieved in two ways, either by tilting the slab or by illuminating it from different directions, which enhances particular parts of the composition and emphasises the visual illusion, typical of Kinetic art (Figure 3.26). Comparing this with the sequence of the swimming deer, we can see how similar they are when we look at some modern examples, e.g. Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (Figure 3.27) by Marcel Duchamp produced in 1912, or The Hand of the Violinist painted by Giacomo Balla in the same year. Each painting projects a sequence of events: the first being an undressed woman walking down the stairs, each step she takes recorded by the artist; similarly in Balla’s work we can trace each movement of the hand as it holds the violin and the violin stick. None of the examples presented above can be seen simply as images showing movement without the integral use of light and shadow rather than as Kinetic art. In terms of the agency of seeing, the illusion of movement was achieved in a number of ways, each requiring artificial light to see them. In the Palaeolithic, light was created by stone lamps fuelled by animal fat, or torches (Aujoulat 2005, Ruspoli 1987). We must remember that such light was always flickering with an uneven intensity, in contrast to the light produced by modern lamps or torches. Light in the Palaeolithic was limited to particular areas, and it was impossible to illuminate the cave walls with the same intensity and clarity of light we see in publications today. The colour of the walls, as well as the different techniques used in producing the images, added to the way light was reflected, and the illusion was created that the images were indeed ‘moving’.

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FIGURE 3.27 Split action movement created by juxtaposing successive images. A. Szczę sny, drawing made after Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (painting, 1912, by Marcel Duchamp: © Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2020).

The agency of seeing was enhanced by the viewers’ moving through the caves, with some depictions high up on the walls and ceilings, while others could only be accessed and viewed by crawling.

Kinetic art – movement per se In the Gravettian (c. 27,000–16,000 years ago) and Magdalenian (17,000–12,000 years ago) periods, a series of objects that encompass movement per se have been recorded by archaeologists. They are disks with a hole in the middle, decorated with abstract or animal imagery, and varying from c. 90 mm to c. 30 mm across. They have been found in a number of locations, in particular the French Pyrenees, but also other parts of France, Spain, central Europe, European Russia, Ukraine and Siberia (Abramova 1962, Azéma 2011, Azéma and Rivère 2012, Graziosi 1960, Leroi-Gourhan and Leroi-Gourhan 1965, Oliva 2005, Sieveking 1971). One example was found at Mal’ta in Siberia, dated to 20,000 years ago

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(Kuzmin 2008), namely the Gravettian period between the Aurignacian and Magdalenian periods. This is several thousand years earlier than previously proposed for the use of movement per se in prehistoric art. Azéma (1991) proposed that these bone discs, previously understood as buttons, are in fact analogous to a device known from the 19th century, a thaumatrope. Spinning or the physical movement of the disk creates an illusion of a moving image. When the disk is static we can see a bird on one side and an empty cage on the other. When the disk is spun, it appears as if the bird is in the cage. In contrary to the 19th century thaumatrope, which had two holes on opposite sides of the disk, the prehistoric examples had only one hole in the middle, but the axis of spinning stayed the same (Figure 3.28). The technique of making disks from animal shoulder blades (scapula) and very rarely from very thin stone, created robust artefacts that did not bend as did the 19th or 20th century examples, which were made of paper. This meant that these prehistoric thaumatropes could be spun or rotated easily even though they only had one hole. Almost 200 complete or fragmentary discs of this kind with a hole in the middle have been found in Palaeolithic contexts (Graziosi 1960, Leroi-Gourhan 1968, Oliva 2005, Sieveking 1971). They can be divided into two categories; those with realistic and those with abstract designs. The latter can be further separated into two types: the first comprise those with the more common motif of ‘a pattern of lines radiating from the central hole’; the second are decorated with a motif comprising ‘a line encircling the disc near the edge and incisions between this and the edge, or notches on the edge’ (Sieveking 1971: 208). The second motif sometimes appears around the edges of the discs with engraved animals as well as alongside the first

Thaumatrope, a bird on one side and the cage on the other, two images combined as seen by the person spinning the disk by twisting the string.

FIGURE 3.28

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motif and zoomorphic image. There is some variation in how the central part of the discs with abstract designs are decorated, in particular cases representing local preferences such as wavy lines on both sides as on a mammoth ivory disk from Mal’ta in Russia (Abramova 1962, Sieveking 1971). In some cases only one side of the disc is decorated so that there is no combination of the two sides of the disc, using the example from above, the bird would not be seen in the cage and there would only be the cage or a bird alone. The subjects of the depictions carved into these prehistoric bone thaumatropes are interesting in projecting the change from younger to older (Figure 3.29), from one type of a creature to another, and/or a whole animal or its parts in movement. These are images from which we can infer the subject by looking at the realistic representation of animals, rather than trying to make assumptions about what the lines on the disc mean. These apparently more abstract designs may have had similar or different meanings to the more realistic depictions of animals. Our contemporary state of knowledge about these pieces, however, does not allow us to make such assumptions, and therefore here I will concentrate only on the realistic depictions. The disc from the Laugerie Basse rock shelter (France) is engraved with sitting versus standing chamois or deer (Graziosi 1960: PL:63:a, Leroi-Gourhan 1968: fig. 245, 246). So, what we see here when spinning the thaumatrope, is that the animal appears to physically move in front of our eyes. The 50 mm diameter bone disc from the Mas d’Azil cave (France) shows engravings of a young bison calf versus a mature female aurochs (Graziosi 1960: PL:63:b, Leroi-Gourhan 1968: fig. 243, 244) (Figure 3.29). The age of the bison has been gauged by looking at the size of

FIGURE 3.29 Movement by spinning action – thaumatrope. a) unknown artist, Mas d’Azil, aurochs, c. 15,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Aurochs and bison, Mas d’Azil. donsmaps); b) unknown artist, Mas d’Azil, bison, c. 15,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Aurochs and bison, Mas d’Azil. donsmaps).

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its body, estimated at half that of an adult animal, while the dimensions of its horns and the curvature of the hump suggest that it might be about five months old. Spinning this disc does not create an illusion of movement as in the previous example. Instead, what we see is a visualisation of the ageing process, in which the young bison becomes old. Discs with both sides engraved were found at the Isturitz cave (France), showing a horse’s head on one side versus a bison’s head on the other. On the disk from Raymonden cave (France) the mammoth on one side has an open eye, while on the other side the eye is closed (Leroi-Gourhan 1968: 79). What we see when spinning the first thaumatrope is a fusion of both heads into one: the bison becomes a horse and the horse becomes a bison. The spinning mammoth head can be interpreted as a visual form of a jest, where the mammoth simply winks at us, perhaps to catch our attention. As mentioned above, some discs have only one side engraved. For example at Bruniquel cave (France), one side is decorated with the upper body of an ibex. On the disc from the Mas d’Azil cave we can see a reindeer (Leroi-Gourhan 1968: 79). A number of disc fragments from the Isturitz cave are engraved on just one side with images of reindeer (Sieveking 1971: 207). In such cases the visual transformation or illustration of movement is not taking place. I would suggest, however, that these discs also belong to the category of Kinetic art since the premise of their use is based on the act of spinning/movement. The discs with only one side decorated are interesting, but not as useful in discussing the idea of Kinetic art and the agency of seeing. They are also more limited in discussing the visualisation of transformation through the process of shapeshifting, and for understanding the meaning of the thaumatrope and its role in the lives of prehistoric communities. While turning the string and spinning discs decorated on both sides, the agency of seeing, the movement per se creates an illusion of shape shifting, one form becoming another. The sitting chamois when spun appears to twist and get up; the young calf becomes an adult female aurochs; the horse’s head becomes a bison’s head; the mammoth opens and closes its eye. By recreating these discs ourselves, we can clearly experience the phenomenon of transformation or shape-shifting as a part of agency of seeing.

Shape-shifting and the agency of seeing The idea of shape-shifting has been discussed widely in later European prehistory (Andrén et al. 2006, Price 2019, Raudvere 2008). In the context of the Palaeolithic agency of seeing, however, it is an idea that has not been fully explored. The archaeological data in the framework of looking at Kinetic art provides us with visual clues about shapes and transformations. The transformation from older to younger animal or vice versa, or from one animal to another, relates to the idea of the passing of time and changing seasons in which animals could be proxies for the transformation of the world from spring to summer to autumn, to winter and back to spring. Such a visual narrative has been recorded in Lascaux (France, c. 15,000 to 16,000 years ago),

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where it has been suggested that particular animals indicate specific seasons: horses suggest the end of the winter and early spring, aurochs summer, and stag autumn (Aujoulat 2005). Keeping in mind the difficulty of proposing such precise links between animals and calendrical seasons when interpreting these thaumatropes, we can still look for seasonal proxies. The agency of seeing, for example in the context of the disc from Mas d’Azil (Figure 3.30), provides us with the possibility of one becoming the other and vice versa; while adult female aurochs look the same all year around, the young bison references autumn and the first signs of winter. One of the most interesting examples of a prehistoric thaumatrope and the agency of seeing comes from the Mas d’Azil cave, where almost half a complete disc was found: ‘on one side there are bifurcated signs and short lines, plus a human creature with arms crossed and legs spread apart, seemingly pinned flat to the ground by what looks like a bear’s paw. The other side shows a man (his genitals clearly indicated) holding what may be a stick or spear on his upper arm; here too there are lines resembling a bear’s paw’ (Leroi-Gourhan 1968: 79) (Figure 3.30). In this fragment of a bone thaumatrope 78 mm x 37 mm in diameter (Figure 3.30) we see two humans, one on each side with the bear paw almost touching them. What makes both images seem human is their torso

FIGURE 3.30 Movement by spinning action – thaumatrope. a) unknown artist, Mas d’Azil, man, c. 15,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Piette 1902); b) unknown artist, Mas d’Azil, human creature, c. 15,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A . Szczę sny after: Piette 1902).

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with hands and legs of proportions appropriate to a human. The engravings suggest a male in a state of sexual arousal, but the head is not in proportion – implying, rather than a human male, some kind of shape-shifting male creature. On the other side the proportions of the limbs versus the torso again suggest a human, but the head cannot be assumed to be human and the lack of any sex defining features makes the image a generic individual of nonspecific gender. What we see here are two creatures with human proportions, one male, but without a head or face that would confirm its human form. What is constant on both sides of the thaumatrope, however, is the hairy paw, most probably belonging to a bear. Turning the object, one creature shifts its shape into the other, while the presence of the paw remains constant. What we see here is a kind of interpretative double jeopardy: the images engraved on the disc show the already transformed individual, which could be interpreted as the depiction of a shaman who has been transformed from a human being into an unknown creature, reflecting the last stage of the shamanic journey. There is, however, a little more to this since the creature is transformed into the other through the act of spinning the thaumatrope. I suggest that it is not, therefore, just the simple figure of a shaman, because one image is transformed in front of our eyes into another: my aim is rather to show movement as an integral part of the story-telling within the Paleolithic agency of seeing. The same can be said about thaumatropes that depict different animals that become one through spinning the device. The reasons for evoking movement by engaging with the agency of seeing, as in Kinetic art, were probably multiple. For example, we are winked at by the mammoth for reasons that can be linked to the mythological realities of Upper Paleolithic Europe, but that could also be used to make people smile and wonder, or simply as a form of visual tease. Looking at the way representations of shape-shifting in later prehistory have been interpreted, one can see that they refer to mythological and religious creatures visualized in the imagery that reflects the stories and the events in which the shapeshifting individuals are taking part, or represent particular gods and deities (Andrén et al. 2006, Price 2019, Raudvere 2008). The acts of transformation, shape-shifting and movement, as captured in the agency of Kinetic art that materializes and ‘activates’ mythological realities, was an essential element within ritual, religious and possibly social aspects that underpinned the lives of prehistoric fisher-gathererhunter communities. Kinetic art effects were an integral part of story-telling and the agency of seeing, without which there would be no transformations, shape-shifting and movement, and the narrative would not have ‘come to life’. It is interesting to consider the audience that would have participated in listening and seeing images, events and happenings. Kinetic art in contexts of agency of seeing was an important part of non-verbal communication, where objects projected movement, transformation and shape-shifting for the individual or a very small group of people standing around person holding it and looking at a spinning thaumatrope. But it happens in the same contexts of social and ritual events accessed by multiple

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numbers of communities at once in the locations marked by rock art paintings or carvings. The agency of seeing is implicit in Kinetic art as well as an integral part of events, story-telling and participation in the mythological realities and religion of Paleolithic communities. The impression of shape-shifting, transformation and movement created by the introduction of light brought the images to life. Animals seem to ‘move’ in the Paleolithic. The spinning thaumatrope creatures change shape, one becoming another, the old becoming young again.

Summary This chapter has focused on the topic of how the agency of seeing allows us to construct our understanding of what we see and what it might mean in the context of material culture. The results of this approach brought unexpected if not uncompromising results in defining women as the first artists of the European continent, their corporal experiences captured in experiential art while their bodies were sculptured by women themselves as if formed in a Cubist fashion. From objects to compositions, the gallery of seeing has been clearly defined as a necessity in the agency of seeing, while 2D narratives when seen in the context of contemporary technology become 3D compositions. Being in different places at the same time, as part of polyphonic storytelling as explored in the literature, was not part of Western visual vocabulary until the 20th century. Prehistoric art not only gives us insight into different trajectories of visual story-telling, but also opens up possibilities in interpreting contemporary art. Unlike in the Kinetic art we know from Western art, movement itself is not enough when used in Palaeolithic contexts: it has an active role or agency in storytelling, without which the story would not happen. The ways of seeing as presented in this chapter are not specific to prehistoric, modern or contemporary visual art. They represent a ‘now’ that allows us to move in time and space without methodological restrictions on interpreting particular images. They are the tools I will be using in setting the art objects in particular cultural, social and ideological contexts, showing the intentionality of the artists in the implicit use of our neurophysiological capacities. Exploration of the intentionality of the artists, meaning and use, or not, of neurophysiological capacities is the topic of the next chapter, where I will focus on embodiment and disembodiment in the cultural contexts of Paleolithic Europe, Joˉ mon Japan and contemporary British sculpture.

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4 POWER OF DISPLAY The artist and the object

Introduction This chapter discusses one of the most hotly debated issues in archaeology today: when did we become human or, rather, what is the material culture evidence that indicates the time and place where hominids in the past started to be like us? In addressing these questions, I deal with three essential issues intricately interwoven into the notion of visual art: Who was the first artist? What was the first art? What are the first visual images that can be interpreted as being artistic images or objects? We also tackle the related issue of the relevance of Renaissance ideas as discussed in Chapter 2, and their use by French archaeologists to argue that the cave paintings of Lascaux were equal in terms of artistic achievement to the Sistine Chapel. Thinking about what it means to be human brings to mind the image created by Banksy, Untitled, encountered in Chapter 2. It shows an undressed male with scruffy hair and facial features, reminding us of Neanderthals rather than Modern Humans (Figure 4.1). He holds a long bone in one hand and a tray full of contemporary take-away food in the other. This juxtaposition of prehistoric and modern makes a good illustration for our discussion of what makes us human. Is it the clothes we wear, or the food we process and eat, or is it a composition of factors that when brought together give us an indication of the cognitive abilities that equal our own?

What makes an artist? It is usually argued that the first art was created by Modern Humans anatomically like us, on the assumption that only Modern Humans possessed the cognitive capacities that allow the creation of art. The cognitive, intellectual and physical capacities of Modern Humans were similar to those possessed by us today. Archaeologists have long sought for clues

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Banksy, L.A. California, Untitled, Banksy, LA, 2008 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Courtesy of Pest Control Office).

FIGURE 4.1

as to what makes us fully modern, and what it means to be Modern rather than Ancient, and what kind of attributes were needed by Modern Humans to create art. The distinction between Modern and Ancient Humans, sometimes also called Early Humans, is based on the skeletal fossil and archaeological records, and suggests that ancestral Homo sapiens emerged in Africa about 200,000 years ago, while fully Modern Humans appeared in the same continent around 150,000 years ago. The first fully Modern Humans to leave Africa for Eurasia did so around 50,000 years ago (Klein 2008). McBrearty and Brooks (2000: 491) have proposed a list of characteristics of Modern Humans living in Europe not shared by preceding Neanderthal populations: 1) increasing artefact diversity; 2) standardization of artefact types; 3) blade technology; 4) worked bone and other organic materials; 5) personal ornaments and ‘art’ or images; 6) structured living spaces; 7) ritual; 8) economic intensification, reflected in the exploitation of aquatic resources that require specialized technology; 9) enlarged geographic range; and 10) expanded exchange networks. Henshilwood and Marean (2003) have expanded the list of characteristics unique

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to fully Modern Humans in their article Traits Used to Identify Modern Human Behaviour (my comments are in italic); •

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Burial of the dead as an indicator of ritual – burial was carried out with respect and reverence to the dead, so they were not just discarded as being rubbish (in our modern terms). In this way, burial represents the conception of a link between the living, the dead and the ancestors, and is an indication of symbolic behaviour. Art, ornamentation, and decoration – the presence of aesthetic preferences, and symbolic and ritual behaviour. Symbolic use of ochre – symbolic use of colour can indicate the execution of aesthetic choices, related to the creation of meaning as in the previous point. Worked bone and antler – since they have different material properties from stone, these require different technological knowledge and general ‘know how’, and so represent diverse and multiple technologies, the use of different raw material, different ways of obtaining this material, and therefore exploitation of the environmental zone from which the material comes. Blade technology – indicates the efficient use of flint by reducing amount of wastage. Standardization of artefact types – is linked to the creation of particular aesthetics of stone tools, related not only to what they are used for but also to how they look, which provides the basis for archaeologists to distinguish between different prehistoric archaeological cultures. Artefact diversity – indicates multiple forms of the same thing, which results in the use of different tools for performing similar tasks. Complex hearth construction – indicates extended period of occupation of one location, and the conceptualisation of the landscape in terms of economy but also in symbolic terms. Organized use of domestic space – how one organizes domestic space indicates the way people live, the way people organize life around themselves in relation to others via material culture, the creation of places of inclusion and exclusion such as task related areas, which can give us a clue about everyday activities, identities, ideology and symbolism. Expanded exchange networks – indicates evidence for the idea of relationships between communities, from which we can learn about the extent and scope of information exchange; was it confined only to one neighbouring community or to a number of communities in the wider social landscape?; what was communicated or exchanged?, e.g. ideas, technologies or items? Effective large-mammal exploitation – allows us to assess the extent of collaboration between individuals and groups in successful planning and execution of the hunt, but also how we map further action of carcass/meat and bone distribution, transport and butchery; how food was stored and how access to meat and bone for future consumption was arranged; how meat or bone was prepared before eating, e.g. storing and cooking.

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Seasonally focused mobility strategies – provides clues about the exploration, exploitation and occupation of different climatic and environmental niches, from which we can see that Modern Humans were more adventurous and versatile than their predecessors. In contrast to other hominids they moved into diverse environments and their knowledge extended across different landscapes and climatic zones. Use of harsh environments – requires material culture not only for the purpose of obtaining food but also as a protection against cold, e.g. clothing, living structures, tool kits allowing the manipulation of the living space (storage of fuel for burning = heat), exploitation of different foodstuffs available only in a particular season. Fishing and fowling – this requires particular technologies, such as netting, that allow the exploitation of diverse landscape zones to a larger extent. It also indicates the ‘know how’ necessary for the exploitation and transformation of various seasonal resources.

The most important of these traits for us here is the ability of Modern Humans to produce aesthetically and artistically qualified images and objects, which indicates that the first artists were Modern Humans. This in turn can be extended to the proposition that if we find an art object we can safely assume that it was created by a Modern Human. Before exploring the importance of the concept of ‘behavioural modernity’ to visual art, I would like to present an argument suggesting that the idea of behavioural modernity itself is misleading. As McBrearty and Brooks (2000) have proposed, we should not look for the ‘human revolution’ resulting in human modernity around 40,000 and 50,000 years ago in Europe, as traces of what we define as characteristics of Homo sapiens can be found in Africa 250,000 and 300,000 years ago and are related to our ancestor Homo helmei. Recent evidence from Indonesian cave art dating to about 40,000 years ago further questions the European origins of visual art (Aubert et al. 2014). In recent years Shea (2011) has suggested that we should be collaborating with the other behavioural sciences and looking for ‘behavioural variability’ instead of ‘behavioural modernity’. He proposes that traces of the traits suggested by Henshilwood and Marean (2003) can be found among early/ancient/ancestral Homo sapiens and do not apply only to the European Palaeolithic. He raises the question of theoretical bias in the disciplines of archaeology and palaeoanthropology. He also argues that while debate focuses on the lack of continuity in characteristics of ‘modern behaviour’, we need to explain how and why they appear and disappear at various places and times. This supports what I have suggested in previous chapters: we need to move away from simplistic evolutionary trajectories applied universally, and to be more specific and context orientated if we would like to avoid the level of generalisation that is meaningless when we talk about past communities, people’s lives and the way they shaped the culture of which they were a part of. Shea’s argument is compelling and is embraced by a number of archaeologists so that some of the ideas he presented are part of an ongoing debate within the discipline (look at the comments in Current Anthropology 2011). We are

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still however, left with the unanswered question: what does it mean to be human? A number of scholars focus on symbolic behaviour as a trade mark that makes us Modern Human (Current Anthropology 2011, de Beaune et al. 2009). I suggest that what we take from those two different approaches, the first postulating ‘behavioural modernity’ and the second ‘behavioural variability’, is the importance of symbolic behaviour while considering what it means to be human, which is not in itself constant. This means that sometimes we can trace its continuity in a particular place and time, while in the others we cannot. The earliest evidence that can be understood as a record of a symbolic behaviour is linked to the use of colour. The intentional utilisation of pigment by humans as an expression of aesthetic or symbolic preferences is known from a variety of sites in the Old World. Pigment was used by human ancestors over 540,000 years ago at the Kathu Pan I site, in South Africa, while the first known application of the pigment is from Tan Tan in Morocco (Figure 1.12), applied on a modified stone formation in the shape of a human (Beaumont and Bednarik 2013). Furthermore, colour use is not only related to obtaining and moderating the materials needed to extract pigments, e.g. by heating substances such as hydrated iron oxide to get ochre or timber to get charcoal, but also the choices of raw material from which tools were made, e.g. the red jasper and greenish white silica dated to between 140,000 and 195,000 years ago in the Omo Valley Kibish Formation, Ethiopia (Shea 2011). In addition, the use of colour has been recorded in Europe prior to the arrival of Modern Humans and dated to around 380,000 years ago at Terra Amata and 250,000 years from Achenheim, both in France. Archaeologists have not regarded the use of pigment by our ancestors as a part of visual artistic expression, except in relation to art objects such as beads. This is somewhat restrictive and confusing, as if a priori we know what an art object is without exploring a wider range of possibilities.

What is an art object? The earliest object recognized by archaeologists as a part of Modern Human visual artistic expression comes from Blombos Cave in the southern part of South Africa, close to the Indian Ocean. It is dated to over 75,000 years ago and consists of engraved pieces of ochre (Figure 4.3) and a number of marine shell beads (Figure 4.2). The presence of 39 Nassarius kraussianus shell beads, found in the stratigraphic unit dated to the M1 phase and two from the slightly older phase dated to between 70,000 and 110,000 years ago (D’Errico 2005, Henshilwood et al. 2004, 2009), is evidence that the inhabitants of this site demonstrated symbolic and artistic behaviour. Symbolic behaviour conveys ideas or meanings, whereas artistic behaviour is an expression of symbolic behaviour via the creation of a visual metaphor to communicate the idea. These shells are one centimetre or smaller, and making holes in them required skill and experience. They were perforated with the help of bone awls, indicating intentional modification rather than random breakages. This is supported by use wear analysis of the shells, suggesting that they were worn as strung beads (Vanhaeren et al. 2013).

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FIGURE 4.2 Nassarius kraussianus shell beads from Blombos Cave, arranged into different types of arrangements, one of which is shown here, between c. 70,000 and 110,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Vanhaeren et al. 2013).

Overall 1,534 pieces of ochre bigger than 10 mm were found on this site, the majority of which belong to occupational phase M3, dated to around 100,000 years ago. The ochre itself was probably obtained from rocks found between 3 to 5 km away (Henshilwood et al. 2009). Few of the fragments have traces of carving or modification, indicating the intentionality in altering just particular pieces. While artificial alterations could be linked to the use of ochre for activities such as tanning, or as medicine against insect bites, (Henshilwood et al. 2009: 29, Rifkin 2012), the symbolic use of ochre is interpreted on the basis of the deliberate signification of some pieces. In particular, piece M1-6 (Figure 4.3) (length 75.8 mm, width 34.8 mm, thickness 24.7 mm) lends itself to such an interpretation. It is dated to between around 70,000 and 80,000 years ago, the same as the shell beads. The engraving was made by creating a symmetrical pattern of cross-cuttings and overlapping lines arranged in a net pattern, a pattern is important in the way our brain conceptualises and recognises arrangements, as discussed in the previous chapter. We can see here a very early example of a neuroaesthetic category used in signifying this small piece of ochre as visually important and instantly recognisable. Christopher Henshilwood et al. (2009: 41) suggests the following for the engraved patterns on the ochre fragments:

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FIGURE 4.3 Engraved fragment of ochre, between c. 100,000 and 75,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Engraved ochre, Blombos Cave. Wikipedia).

the overall result confirm that unequivocal engraved patterns are present in the MSA levels at Blombos Cave. Conservatively, this conclusion concerns at least eight pieces coming from layers (M-1, M1-4, M1-5, M1-6, M-3-1, M3-6, M3-7, M3-10, and possibly the conjoining pieces M3-3, M3-8). This indicates that they have been intentionally engraved and that it was not a part of the ochre pieces functional use but represents symbolic modification (Henshilwood et al. 2002, 2004, 2009). Furthermore, in the slightly younger layers of Blombos Cave, a silcrete flake marked by red crossed lines was found (Henshilwood et al. 2018), suggesting the use of red pigment and net pattern as in the other periods. Two abalone shells (Haliotis midae) from the same site were used as containers for mixing the ochre red pigment, dated to 97,000 to 105,000 years ago. A quartzite stone was found in one of the shells, its shape securely fitted into the size of the shell. It bore traces indicating its use as a grinder or a pounder. The substance in the shell was composed mostly of red ochre fragments and fragments of trabecular bone, some of which were burnt. This type of bone contains a large amount of fat and marrow, indicating its use as a binding agent. Charcoal, quartz, quartzite and calcium phosphate were also present. It appears that all these ingredients were mixed in the shell, demonstrating the intentional preparation of red pigment (Henshilwood et al. 2011). What we see here for the first time is the use of personal ornamentation, perhaps the earliest in human history. The use of colour, however, indicates the long tradition of pigment use dating back to early human ancestors. Despite discoveries of objects of personal ornamentation in other locations in subsequent periods in Northern Africa (Bouzouggar et al. 2007, D’Errico et al. 2009, McBrearty and Brooks 2000), Blombos Cave is still the first archaeological site with evidence of symbolic behaviour, defining the presence of Modern Humans 100,000 years ago.

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The artist and the object The use of ochre as a pigment and the presence of personal ornaments such as beads place the focus on Modern Humans as artists using materials for nonutilitarian purposes, as postulated in the single-species model. Paul Mellars (2005) proposes that art and variety of tool production and use constitute unique characteristics of Modern Humans, and that when artefacts with such qualities are not found in Modern Human but Neanderthal contexts, they are the result of ‘inter population cultural and exchange mechanisms’ (Mellars 2010: 20148). He argues that such finds date to 45,000 to 35,000 years ago, which coincides with the period of the arrival of Modern Humans in Europe and the final phase of the Neanderthal occupation of the continent, and represent a process of ‘acculturation’ or ‘bow-wave diffusion’. According to Mellars this period shows the influence of Modern Humans over Neanderthals. There is no evidence for any such artistic or symbolic impulse during the 250,000 years prior to the contact between two populations, when Neanderthals dominated Europe and much of Asia. This is taken as proof that Neanderthals did not possess similar cognitive capacities to the Modern Human: ‘This model suggests a cultural “revolution” in the transition from the Middle to the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe’ (Moro Abadía and González Morales 2010: 231). However, recent archaeological discoveries question whether the first artists were indeed Modern Humans, since similar assemblages have been found among material culture associated with Neanderthals. It is now proposed that this evidence for Neanderthal artistic activity occurred independently, without any influence from Modern Humans, a development contrary to the singlespecies model presented below.

Who are the artists? Who were the Neanderthals? They were one of the human species that shares a common ancestor with us. On the basis of mitochondrial DNA and fossil records, Modern Humans are understood to start to develop some 410,000 to 440,000 years ago (Endicott et al. 2010), became established around 100,000 years ago and left Africa about 60,000 years ago (Stringer 2012). The division between Neanderthals and Modern Humans has evolutionary rather than biological foundations, and is related to the different environmental zones each species occupied. Early fossils of Modern Humans are known from Africa, whereas the remains of Neanderthals are found only in Europe and Asia. The cold climate of Europe shaped the development of the Neanderthal body to best preserve heat, which resulted in a number of adaptive features, leading to their distinctive stocky and heavily-built bodies with short limbs. In contrast, living in Africa, Modern Humans developed bodily features allowing the quick release of heat, which resulted in a tall and slender body with long legs. In recent years the existence of differences between the brains of Modern Humans and

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Neanderthals have been proposed (Pearce et al. 2013), Neanderthals having a greater proportion of their brain giving over to visual systems while Modern Humans emphasising visual communication a factor which possibly shaped the emphasis on visual communication among Modern Humans. By 150,000 years ago, Neanderthals had spread through the Near East and beyond the Caspian and Aral Seas to the Altai and Ural Mountains (Green et al. 2010, Krause et al. 2007) (Figure 4.4). Around 40,000 years ago Modern Humans appeared in Europe. During the last stages of the Neanderthal presence in Europe, between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago, the fossil records shows both species inhabiting the continent, indicating a period of approximately 20,000 years between Homo sapiens arriving in Europe and Homo neanderthalensis dying out. From the late 1990s the relationship between stratigraphy and the radiocarbon dating of two major archaeological lithic complexes or cultures has been revaluated: the Châtelperronian, associated with Neanderthals, and the Aurignacian, associated with Modern Humans (Zilhão 2007). This re-evaluation was driven by the question of whether Neanderthals co-existed with Modern Humans or not. If they co-existed, Neanderthals perhaps learned or copied from Modern Humans. If they led entirely separate lives, then Neanderthals somehow developed particular characteristics that were previously only attributed to Modern Humans, which would indicate the independent development of similar cognitive and behavioural capacities in both species. In recent years it has been argued that those characteristics could also be identified among Neanderthals, for example symbolic behaviour such as burial practices, the use of pigments – now known from over 40 Neanderthal sites, the exploitation of a wider range of food sources than previously thought, including fish, and the use of complex techniques such as hafted stone knives using birch bark pitch, all before the appearance of Modern Humans in Europe (D’Errico et al. 2003, Finlayson et al. 2012, Hardy and Moncel 2011, McBrearty and Stringer 2007, Peresani et al. 2011, Zilhão 2007).

Spread of Homo neanderthalensis in Europe, central Asia and Siberia (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Krause et al. 2007).

FIGURE 4.4

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The key site in this discussion is La Grotte du Renne at Arcy-sur-Cure in France. It has yielded four particular aspects of material culture of central importance when discussing visual art. The first is the presence in the Châtelperronian layers of modified bone tools (Caron et al. 2011, D’Errico et al. 2010) made out of the bones of horse, reindeer, hyena and unidentified carnivores, while in the Aurignacian levels only horse and reindeer bone was used to produce the tools. Second, a total of 73 awl tools were identified from La Grotte du Renne, two from the Mousterian level, 52 from the Châtelperronian layer. Thirty Châtelperronian awls were closely examined and, in comparison with experimental tests, the use wear found on archaeological examples indicated that they were used to perforate leather. The third are pendants or appliqué beads made out of animal teeth, ivory and shell: bovid, fox and marmot teeth, reindeer phalange and shell fossil belonging to the Rhynchonella sp. They were all grooved or perforated, creating a structure that allowed the items to have been threaded or tied, indicating their use as personal ornaments, and therefore symbolic and/or aesthetic behaviour. Lastly, stones with facets indicating their use for grinding black and red pigments were found. Again, the use of colours suggests symbolic behaviour and/or a particular aesthetic. The main issue in the discussion between archaeologists about these finds is about their attribution to the Châtelperronian or Aurignacian layers, as the former indicates that they were created by Neanderthals, while the latter suggests Modern Humans were responsible (Caron et al. 2011, D’Errico et al. 2010, Higham et al. 2010, Leroi-Gourhan and Leroi-Gourhan 1965, Zilhão 2007). However, as in so many archaeological sites, the stratigraphy of the La Grotte du Renne is complicated and sometimes not as clear as we would wish. The levels of the cave were divided into a chronological sequence of Mousterian (oldest), Châtelperronian, Protoaurignacian, Aurignacian and Gravettian (youngest), and in between the well-defined stratigraphic levels identified with these particular archaeological cultures there are also transitional layers in between (Higham et al. 2010), notably the ‘Protoaurignacian’ layer laying between Neanderthal and Modern Human occupational deposits of the cave (Caron et al. 2011). Thomas Higham and his co-authors’ discussions of the radiocarbon dating of the stratigraphic levels in the cave suggest that some artefacts were mixed between different deposits and archaeological cultures, which in turn does not allow a clear distinction to be drawn between Neanderthal and Modern Human occupational layers (Higham et al. 2010). Furthermore, a crushed horse tooth dated to the lower Mousterian between 49,000 and 53,000 years ago has been found in the Châtelperronian layers higher up in the sequence, proving that there was some mixing of the artefacts. Despite these words of caution, the radiocarbon dating of one of the items, the awl, proves that this is the oldest example of this kind of tool in Europe known at present, dated to around between 40,000 and 37,000 years ago. Furthermore, a similar awl, dated to between 36,000 to 38,000 years ago and found in the Mousterian layer, is believed also to have come from the Neanderthal occupation layer. What is most important here is that the dating of both of these tools indicates that they were both

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made before the arrival of Modern Humans, although it is possible that the second awl moved from Aurignacian layers above the Châtelperronian level, and so be a product of Modern Humans. Still, one awl at least has a secure Neanderthal provenance, demonstrating that it was produced by Homo neanderthalensis without the influence of Homo sapiens. One thing that is certain from the material culture remains of the La Grotte du Renne is that at least one, if not two, awls date from the period of Homo neanderthalensis, and could not be influenced or copied from Homo sapiens as Homo sapiens was not present in this part of Europe at that time. Furthermore, most of the personal ornamentation and pigment preparation artefacts come from the layers exclusively occupied by Neanderthals. The relationship between Neanderthals and the symbolic behaviour expressed by the use of pigment and bead is confirmed by a number of discoveries in Spain dated to around 50,000 years ago (Zilhão et al. 2010). At the rock shelter of Antón a fragment of shell was found with an artificially applied mixture of red hematite and yellowish goethite colours creating orange pigmentation on the outside, in contrast to the natural red colour of the inside of the shell, dating to around 37,000 years ago (Figure 4.5). It is argued that the shell was used as a pallet for painting, pigment container or body decoration (Zilhão et al. 2010). A second example of the intentional use of colour comes from the Aviones cave, dating to between 45,000 and 50,000 years ago. If this shell had not been broken during excavation, it would be the oldest known pigment container outside Africa.

Fragment of Pecten maximus shell from the Antón rock shelter. Outside part painted with orange pigment, c. 37,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Zilhão et al. 2010).

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The shell actually still holds residues of the colour substance, indicating its use as a portable colour container. The pigment ingredients found in the shell are red lepidocrocite blended with charcoal, dolomite, hematite and pyrite (Zilhão et al. 2010). From the same site and archaeological layer, a number of beads made of perforated shells of Glycymeris insubres and Acanthocardia tuberculata were also found, indicating intentionality in the creation of personal ornamentation, most possibly a necklace or bracelet. Some were perhaps stitched onto cloth as appliqué (Figure 4.6). Significantly, the use of colour also extended to altering the appearance of the shells worn, with hematite used to redden two Glycymeris insubres shells. The substance used to create the pigment was gathered and brought to the site from the surrounding landscape. At the Antón rock shelter it was transported from about 5 km away, and at the Aviones cave from between 3 to 5 km away, indicating intentionality and planning in the creative process of the acquisition of colouring materials. These examples require us to accept that Homo neanderthalensis was creating visual expressions linked with the production of art, and with no influence from Homo sapiens. If, as we argue here, Neanderthals were producing art, then Modern Humans are not the only species with the cognitive capacities to express themselves via visual imagery. That data pushed scholars to look at other possibilities, going beyond a ‘single species model’ to suggest that not only

FIGURE 4.6 Acanthocardia tuberculata, and Glycymeris insubres shells from the Aviones Cave, between c. 45,000 and 50,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Zilhão et al. 2010).

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Modern Humans exhibited the supposedly defining characteristic of the production of art, as summarized by Oscar Moro Abadía and Manuel González Morales (2010: 230): … several specialists have recently suggested that art and symbolic behaviour are not exclusive to anatomically Modern Humans. They have proposed the ‘multiple species model for the origin of behavioural modernity’ (e.g. D’Errico et al. 1998, 2003, Soressi and D’Errico 2007, Vanhaeren 2005, Vanhaeren and D’Errico 2006, Zilhão 2007), a theory based on the premise that ‘the traits that define behavioural modernity are not peculiar to our species and arose over a long period among different human types, including Neanderthals’. (D’Errico 2003: 189) This has led archaeologists to recognize aesthetic capacities in the choices made by Neanderthals. For me, the difference between the single and multiple species model lies in the issue of intentionality. In the single species model, Neanderthals are simply copying from Modern Humans without attaching meaning to their visual material expression. In the multiple species model, Neanderthals demonstrate intentionality of meaning through creating self-identity on the individual and community level (White 1982: 170), producing ‘clearly symbolic artifacts’ (Mellars 1989, 362), and objects that ‘communicate the self-awareness and identity of the individual as well as the social group’ (Bar-Yosef 2002; 367; see also Henshilwood and Dubreuil 2011, Moro Abadía and González Morales, 2010). Pigments as well as material culture objects were used to communicate awareness and the identity both of and between individuals and groups. In 2010 the DNA sequence of the Neanderthal genome was decoded, indicating that up to 4% of the modern European genome comes from Homo neanderthalensis. We share an ancestry with Homo neanderthalensis, indicating inter-breeding between the species. This possibly happened in the Middle East between 100,000 and 50,000 ago when both species occupied this area (Green et al. 2010: 721). DNA analyses have also shown that the Neanderthal genome is close to the populations of contemporary Eurasia (Europe, Han China and New Guinea) but not sub-Saharan Africa, indicating that inter-breading happened before the creation of difference within Eurasian populations (Figure 4.7). So, the question here is, do contemporary humans share the artistic legacy of both Neanderthals and Modern Humans? The situation became even more complex in 2011 when a new species of Homo, who left Africa around one million years ago, was discovered. The new hominin is called Denisovian after the Denisova cave in the Caucusus where their remains were found. DNA analysis of the tooth established the relationship between Neanderthals, Modern Humans and Denisovians (Figure 4.8), indicating that over one million years ago there was a split between two development paths, one leading to the Denisovians and a second to Neanderthals and Modern Humans. However, Denisovians, like Neanderthals, share a gene pool with populations found in contemporary Melanesia,

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The gene pool shared between Neanderthals and modern populations (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Gene pool shared between Neanderthals and modern populations. News.bbc).

FIGURE 4.7

FIGURE 4.8 Location of Denisova Cave, Russia. Shaded area shows spread of Homo Neanderthalensis in Europe, central Asia and Siberia as shown in the Figure 4.4.

indicating the spread of both species toward the southeast (Figure 4.9). Modern Australasians carry about 5% Denisovian DNA (Stringer 2012). This shows not only an ancestral split within the Homo genus but also relationships between each species that occurred a very long time ago, as well as indicating that our cognitive capacities could be the result of inheritance from multiple ancestors. Some researchers question the use of such a small sample to define new species. This is a very important issue for archaeology since the further back in time we move or explore, the fewer remains we have from environments that do not favour the preservation of organic materials, meaning that archaeologists dealing with this data usually do not work with statistically significant samples: we work with what we have rather than what we would like to have.

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FIGURE 4.9 A gene pool shared between Devisovians and Neanderthals with modern populations (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Gene pool shared between Devisovians and Neanderthals with modern populations. News.bbc, and Plos.org).

The key point here is that various ancestral human species contributed to the gene pool of modern human populations around the world. This in turn poses the question of our artistic heritage: so who were the first artists? If the first artist was a Modern Human because he or she created an object used as a personal ornament within a particular sense of aesthetics and symbolic meaning, a similar object created by a Neanderthal can be equally understood as an art object. In this case, therefore, if the Modern Human is considered an artist because he or she created an art object, equally a Neanderthal can also be regarded as an artist. This circular argument further assumes that Neanderthals had similar cognitive abilities to Modern Humans, since both procured and used similar art objects. Such reasoning by default makes an artist out of a Neanderthal.

The art object Let us take a closer look at the earliest art object. An art object is defined in the archaeological literature as an item of personal ornamentation/adornment equated with symbolic objects (Moro Abadía and González Morales 2010), which begs the further question: what is the difference (if any) between an art object and a symbolic object? Returning to Duchamp’s Fountain (Figure 4.10), we can certainly say that within our culture it is an art object, but is it a symbolic object? If it is not a symbolic object using the modes of understanding of early art, Duchamp’s Fountain is not an art object. Therefore, the Neanderthal is not an artist, nor is the Modern Human. We know, however, that the Fountain was made as an everyday object in the factory. In terms of the cultural criteria of the time, it becomes an art object since it was declared as such by the artist. In this way, an art object does not need to be physically created by an artist: it can become one simply if pronounced as such by the artist.

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Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: © Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019).

FIGURE 4.10

But are beads art objects, or just beads? This leads to the question of whether ornaments are visual art. The same principle governs the distinction between personal ornaments as other works of art, those which were made by artists and those which were not. Jewellery – personal ornaments as art objects – are works by people considered to produce small sculptures that, due to their usage and size, fall into the category of jewellery, e.g. Lalique or Tiffany, where one of the main components is often not precious or semiprecious stones but glass, an ordinary material used so commonly in different forms that its value lies in who made it, rather than the commodity or material it is made from. At this point it is useful to define the notion of the art object, since within our own cultural understanding of art, perforated shells or animal teeth are not normally considered art objects. However, in the context of archaeological enquiry, while trying to establish the expression of symbolic meaning as well as the aesthetic preferences for these apparently very unassuming material cultures, beads made out of shell should be considered art objects. Furthermore, in this postmodern era, understanding art objects in this way is possible because it encompasses a broader conception of art, in which its social, symbolic and aesthetic contexts become part of how we understand art. Moreover, since some objects found in archaeological contexts were used for body modification, and since the body itself can be understood in the contemporary world as an art object, objects used to modify the body become part of the modified body, and so the whole composition – modified body (painted) with objects of ornamentation – becomes an art object.

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Does such an art object play a part in the secular/religious life of any particular community by being a modified body or part of it? The answers lie all around us. We can see that we create our sense of belonging by the way we modify our bodies, by dressing in particular ways, by cutting or arranging our hair, or by shaving different parts of our bodies. These all reflect a ‘different dimension in social communication establishing, modifying, commenting on major social categories, age, gender, sex, status which are also defined in speech and in action’ (Strathern 1996: 15). What we are seeing here is the act of creating the metaphor via body modification in the process of social and individual body creation. By modifying bodies we visually moderate the answers to the questions: who am I?; do I, or do I not, belong to this community or to this set/category of peoples? (e.g. Bar-Yosef 2002, Henshilwood and Dubreuil 2011, McBrearty and Stringer 2007, Moro Abadía and González Morales 2010, White 1995). Returning to archaeology and the argument presented above, both Neanderthals and Modern Humans create and use pigment, and produce and use objects of personal ornamentation that express similar cognitive and symbolic abilities. We can also say that Neanderthals, like Modern Humans, modified their bodies and created individual and social categories of belonging via visual communication between people and communities. Recent dating of images from three Spanish caves further confirm this statement, by proving that the cave paintings were created by the Neanderthals around 20,000 years prior to the arrival of Modern Humans in Europe (Hoffmann et al. 2018). Alongside the paintings in the Spanish caves that include the use of hand stencils (Hoffmann et al. 2018) is one of the most striking examples of early art objects from the archaeological record, important in considering Neanderthal abilities in creating art: the so-called mask from La Roche-Cotard, dated to around 35,000 thousand years ago (Marquet and Lorblanchet 2003) (Figure 4.11). This object is interpreted as a sculpture made of modified stone and bone, representing a face. In the 1975 excavation, a number of Mousterian type flint tools, herbivore ribs and a figurine in the shape of a face were found in undisturbed cultural layers recognized as Neanderthal, around the remains of a fire. The site is understood as an ephemeral stopping point: on the beach of the Loire, [where people] lit a fire and prepared food. Perhaps this served as a point of departure for short expeditions into the environs for the game they needed, or even for expeditions further afield, as shown by the variety of raw materials with which the tools were made. (Marquet and Lorblanchet 2003: 663) For this figurine to be recognised as a face, it needs to go through a process of being seen, as discussed in Chapter 1. The image is firstly transferred via our eyes into our visual cortex, which is connected to the brain areas that make sense of what we see. This is done by accessing the stored information that allows us to acquire the reference to what we see, which in turn situates the

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FIGURE 4.11 Unknown artist, la Roche-Cotard, the flint mask, c. 35,000 years ago (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Marquet and Lorblanchet 2003).

image in a particular category, in this case that of a face. The act of creating the face has a cultural basis and depends on the neurophysiological capacity of our bodies to recognise a face (we will return to this in Chapters 5 and 6). Thus we can see that Neanderthals were culturally stimulated/motivated to create the image of the face. To accomplish this, the stone was adjusted to achieve that goal. Part of the flint was chipped away: the removal of the top part gives the impression of a wellproportioned top of the head. The removal of the right side of the flint created the cheek, while the removal of the surface just to the left of the cheek created the impression of the nose. Such intentional flint modification produced the symmetry of the face. Furthermore, a bone was inserted into the cavity of the flint to introduce another small flint to achieve the effect of an eye, while the other eye was made in a similar way but without the support of the bone (Marquet and Lorblanchet 2003). Looking at the process of how this sculpture was made, it was clearly the intention of the artist to create an image of a face. The accomplished composition of two eyes, cheeks, nose and possibly a mouth within the overall shape visually reinforces the depiction of a face. We do not know whose face it is: is it a feline or a Neanderthal person? The mask from La Roche-Cotard contradicts Mellars’ idea that Neanderthals simply copied the production of artistic objects from Modern Humans: here we see an independent category of an object that has no equivalent in the art of Modern Humans from when they occupied Europe at the same time as Neanderthals.

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If we renounce Vasari or 19th century ideas about the evolution of art that draw us towards representation, and instead focus on the aesthetic preferences of the Neanderthal, as well the postmodern inclusiveness of different categories of objects being considered as art (Chapter 2) and current archaeological discussion of how to define creativity in deep prehistory, I argue that we can call the mask from La Roche-Cotard a sculpture and an artistic expression of a face created by a Neanderthal artist, as was the case with personal ornaments. When looking at this item we can ask ourselves, ‘does it have the particular quality of an art object?’, because it can be defined as being made by an artist in our culture, which gives it the qualitative categorisation of an art object. We have to consider, however, that in the past there was most likely no such relationship between the object and its creator. It could indeed be the other way around, with the object defining the maker and not vice versa; or perhaps it did not matter who made it, what was most important was that it was made. From an archaeological perspective the latter is definitely of significance, since it shows Neanderthal independent choices, based on cultural sets of categorisation about what was created and seen. We must remember that the most common type among the very few items that have survived until their discovery in recent years are art objects used in body modification by Neanderthals and Modern Humans. They could be used in different contexts and times, for example being worn for particular events, or during particular seasonal celebrations, or by specific groups of people whose sense of belonging was signified by such modification. This in turn gives the object meaning derived from the events at which they were worn, and/or they signify the event itself, and/or the person who wore them, and/or the person’s role in the event. What is important here are the aesthetic qualities these objects contain and how they look, since sharing this visual quality is what allows other people or communities to relate to them because visually they resemble (or not) their own body ornaments. They might not mean the same, but they are nevertheless instantly recognisable and visually referential. For example, we do not see such items made from stone because the cultural preferences are on other materials and associations they encompass. There is, however, one more item we need to take into consideration when talking about art: the human body itself. When we talk about ornaments, their context when being seen is not in a jewellery shop or a museum cabinet. Personal ornaments are envisaged as being seen adorning the human body, in the same way that a picture is to be seen on the wall; we don’t think of people wearing pictures.

Human body as an art object When we look at the early use of ornaments, we need to also think about other forms of body modification such as clothing: ‘The ubiquitous nature of dress would seem to point to the fact that dress or adornment is one of the means by which bodies are made social and given meaning and identity’ (Entwistle 2015: 7).

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One of the earliest known examples of body modification through clothing comes from the burials of two young individuals at Sungir, Russia (Figure 4.12). The burials of two juveniles or adolescents at Sungir 3 and 2, a girl aged between nine and ten years old, and a boy aged twelve and thirteen years old, are dated to between 27,000 and 24,000 years ago (Alexeeva and Bader 2000, Dobrovolskaya et al. 2012, Formicola 2007, Formicola and Buzhilova 2004, Kuzmin and Orlova 2004, Pettitt 2011, Pettitt and Bader 2000, White 1999, 2003). The bodies were placed in the grave at the same time, giving us an unprecedented insight into Modern Humans’ response to the cold climate via body modification by clothing, since the site was located only 150 kilometres from the continental glacier. We know, relatively, a lot about both individuals, considering the period of around 27,000 years between their deaths and writing this book. On the basis of DNA analyses and femoral bone morphology (the thigh bone), it was established that they were biologically related on one side. The girl’s skeletal remains indicate that she was born from a mother who suffered from diabetes. We know that both individuals, in particular the girl, survived periods of physiological stress, such as illness or a period of starvation, in infancy. It is suggested that the boy might have suffered from a fungal infection. Furthermore, on the basis of dental plaque on the girl’s teeth, it was concluded that she may have consumed a different diet to the boy, although isotopic analysis suggests that they shared a similar diet consisting of herbivorous animals and plants. Looking at the bones and the marks left on them by the attached muscles, we know they were both physically active: while the girl carried heavy loads, the boy used his right arm in a throwing movement. It is important to stress, however, that these two skeletons cannot be an indicator of the activities that produced patterns for the whole community, such as the gender division of tasks. The bodies were placed in the grave head to head, on their backs and fully dressed. By careful excavation, documentation and consequent analysis, archaeologists were able to reconstruct the way the two individuals were dressed (Figure 4.12). What is striking in both cases is the great amount of time used to produce the thousands of beads used as appliqué on clothing and shoes. White (1995), through conducting experimental work, has suggested that the beads attached to the clothing of just one of the individuals took around 5,000 to make. This is clear evidence that intentionality in the way visual communication is conducted via body modification was not limited to adults. Around the remains of the girl, 5,274 beads and their fragments were found, with another 4,903 around the boy. White’s assessment of the time required to make all these beads is based on the number and size of beads, as well as the techniques used to produce them, time that was specific to the production of those particular beads, as they were not created from ‘recycled’ beads that once belonged to an older adult. Interestingly, it appears that the manufacture of beads used in adult clothing was much shorter (three thousand hours), estimated from analysing beads from an adult burial from the same site, although dated several thousand years later, around 23,000 years ago. This adult male burial at Sungir 1, which cut into the earlier burials (Sungir 2 and 3), is also interesting since it allows us to look at the use of colour (White

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Burials at Sungir 1 and 2, Libor Balák’s reconstruction (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Courtesy of the artist. © Libor Balák).

FIGURE 4.12

1995). Alongside ivory beads and pendants made of animal teeth, as in the earlier graves of the girl and the boy, some elements of his clothing were artificially coloured. He wore 25 mammoth ivory bracelets (ivory/off white colour) on his forearms and biceps, some of which were painted black, and around his neck a red painted pendant with black dots was suspended. The black and red aesthetic preferences are not only found on this site, but also at other settlements of the same period, including Kostenki and Gagarino in Russia. In terms of our discussion of early art, we need to consider the body as an item of display, modified by other objects and enhanced by colour, strengthening the visual power of the whole composition, as part of the neurophysiological capacities of being human. By artificially modifying our bodies via dressing, tattooing or painting, we express ourselves as human, and these acts of bodily transformation transcend different cultures, climates and regions over the last 100,000 years. We cannot trace the evolution of this capacity of being human throughout this long period, we can only assess and interpret how it was used. These acts of transformation temporarily or permanently define the person involved, encourage particular responses, acknowledge and reinforce an association or dissociation from others. These themes are discussed in the next two chapters. As John Shea (2011) has proposed, ‘behavioural variability’ does not need to be expressed in all places and periods in the same way. This implies that certain characteristics can persist for long periods of time or be abandoned, only to be practiced again in the future. In addition, due to preservational factors, some practices are archaeologically undetectable in the majority of contexts, for example, the use of organic materials. I suggest that these non-linear modes of practice and the absence of data due to preservational factors produce hiatuses in particular forms of visual expression, but it does not mean that there is a lack of creation of metaphor via visual communication and the use of material culture.

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It could just take different forms to those that are archaeologically detectable. Such hiatuses can also be interpreted via the actor-network theory (Latour 2005), where the human body becomes the localiser/articulator of the metaphor it embodies via body modification. This, however, works only in particular circumstances and contexts and, if they are absent, there is either no need for body modification (this concept is further explored in the next chapter), or it takes a form that is archaeologically undetectable. Considering the way the body has been modified and the issue of embodiment, we can approach the question of early art and its meaning from Merleau-Ponty’s perspective. The statement ‘I am conscious of my body via the world’ by Merleau-Ponty (2002: 94) provides us with the setting of the body as an art object or as an object of non-verbal communication. Therefore, when modifying the body, in a very broad sense, one modifies the world. In the simplest way this can be seen via the way particular people dress or use makeup and how this reflects on the world around them. It forms an important part of how people express themselves in the world of which they are a part, which in turn influences that world itself. This gives the body the dimension of a subject alongside being an art object and, moreover, in which, bodily inspiration is not so much a writing with or on the body (both of which assume a body subject that pre-exists writing), but rather it is an infinite (re)writing and (re)reading of the body subject in and through its relations with carnal sensuosity of the Other and the world, and with culturally and historically specific social fictions. (Sullivan 2001: 8) This is done in very small steps taken by each of us, but it affects how we relate to each other as well as how others relate to us, and how we keep or push social norms about how one looks in specific contexts of interaction with others, or alters or preserves the contexts of such interactions and the culture of which they are a part of. In the context of embodiment, body modification can be interpreted as a visual metaphor in reinforcing the sense of belonging, where the identity ascribes itself to the mainstream or into the subversive subcultures which seek to undermine the established status quo in similar ways in the both Western and non-Western societies of the world (Conklin 1997, Colchester 2003, Csordas 1999, Douglas 1970, 1966, Entwistle 2015, Ewart and O’Hanlon 2007, Hansen 2004, Küchler and Were 2005, Reischer and Koo 2004, Strathern 1988, 1996, Thomas et al. 2005). Artificial body transformation via tattooing and/or painting, piercing, exercise, surgical alterations and clothing, as well as the use of the human body in contexts of artistic manifestation, can be seen in contemporary art as body art (Archer 2002, Fenske 2007, Sanders with Vail 2008). In this setting the body is understood in terms of a ‘canvas’ to be painted, pierced or modified. Sometimes the body of the artist was used and recorded in particular performative or static contexts (Lucie-Smith 1995,

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Smith 2009). This is also known as Living Sculpture (Lucie-Smith 1984: 32). Examples of body modification can be seen in cosmetic surgery, where different parts of the body are altered to make the body look more culturally and aesthetically desirable. This is not, however, a modern phenomenon or Modern Human characteristic. The use of black feathers from at least 18 species of raptors (birds of prey) and corvids (crow family) from 1,699 sites occupied by Neanderthal has been recorded (Finlayson et al. 2012) (Figure 4.13). The analyses of bone assemblages suggest that the acquisition of birds was linked to the demand for black feathers rather than the consumption of bird meat. Feathers are considered most likely used in clothing, since they would degrade very quickly if used as beading due to feather-degrading bacteria present in the soil. In the Late and Final periods (4,000–2,300 years ago) of the Joˉ mon culture of Japan (Habu 2004, Kaner 2010, Kobayashi 2004) we can find interesting examples of body modification within archaeological contexts of prehistoric fisher-gatherer-hunter communities. The individuals belonging to those communities modified their teeth by filing, had complicated hair arrangements, probably tattooed and/or painted their bodies and wore elaborate clothing. These observations are based on the interpretation of ceramic figurines and masks that have particular designs applied to them, understood as representations of body modification via tattooing and clothing design. Tangible evidence of body modification through altering appearance is the removal of well visible teeth (Figure 4.14). Scientific analyses of the Jomon people’s diet based on the ratio of δ15 Nitrogen and δ13 Carbon isotopes indicate that there is a correlation between body modification and food consumed (Kusaka et al. 2008, 2011). At the Inariyama site the individuals whose two maxillary canines and mandibular teeth were removed (C2) consumed a diet based on marine resources, while individuals with four lower incisors removed

FIGURE 4.13

Crow.

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(4I) consumed food coming mainly from terrestrial sources. Such body modification altered their appearance permanently as well as providing a visual clue to their food consumption. Interestingly, further isotopic analysis has shown that the individuals with type 2C teeth modification were not incomers who had married the individuals with 4I teeth modification, as was previously argued (Kusaka et al. 2012), indicating internal divisions within the community based on food consumption, suggesting possible specialisation in food procurement. Body modification was used as an identity indicator in the context of inner group distinction between those whose diet was mostly based on marine resources versus those consuming a majority of terrestrial food. Another example from a different period and part of the world is the well preserved body from burial mound 2 of Pazyryk, which gives us a further clue about body modification (Giles 2013, Koryakova and Epimakhov 2007, Parker-Pearson 1999, Rudenko 1970). The burial was discovered in 1948 in the foothills of the Altai Mountains in Russia, and belonged to a member of one of the Scythian tribes that occupied the area north of the Black Sea, dating to the Iron Age, around 2,400 years ago. The body of the warrior was well preserved due to embalming, the nature of the deposition and the constant environmental conditions within the kurgan. The barrow had been robbed, resulting in part of the body being destroyed. Despite the looting, the barrow still contained a number of items made from wood, leather, horn, felt, silk, fur and precious metals. These included a large rug, elaborated horse gear, a four-wheeled chariot, cannabis inhaling equipment used during funerary rituals, and clothing. In the same carved larch coffin, along with a 60 year old man who was killed by a blow to his head, was a woman (aged over 40 years old). The kurgan also contained a number of horses, indicating the importance of these animals in the lives of the deceased as well as in Scythian society. The man and woman’s power and wealth were linked to a stockbreeding-farming economy linked to pastoral nomadism, horse herding, trade and warfare.

FIGURE 4.14 Body modification in prehistoric Japan, first jaw without modification, second with type 2C and the third 4I modification.

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The burials were dug during the summer when the soil was not frozen. An estimated 2,100 square meters of soil were removed from the four to six metre deep pit. The larch used in the construction of the chamber was cut and transported from the forest zone into the steppe where the barrow was constructed during winter, as shown by the dendrochronological analysis of the timbers (Koryakova and Epimakhov 2007: 218–219). It is estimated that the labour needed for the construction of the burial required 200 to 400 individuals working for ten days, or 70 to 140 people working for one month, suggesting that the burial was created before the death occurred. It is proposed that the bodies were embalmed to keep them well preserved in the period before the burial since it took place in the spring and early summer (Giles 2013, Rudenko 1970). The chamber had timber walls, floor and roof, similar to the wooden houses used by Scythians in the winter. The female and male bodies were placed in a chamber and covered by soil, and the burial mound was then finished by a layer of stones. A number of similar burials dominated the landscape and provided points of economic, social and ancestral references to the nomadic communities (Koryakova and Epimakhov 2007). Objects placed in the burial chamber give us a window into the life, dress and artistic preferences of the buried individuals and their societies, while the body of the man provides indications of practices of body modification in Iron Age Scythian societies. It was tattooed and covered by elaborate and colourful clothing, so that the tattoos were only visible to others when the warrior was undressed (Figure 4.15) (Rudenko 1970: 109–113). We can see a number of interwoven animals covering the man’s left and right arms, back and right leg. The left part of his chest and left leg did not survive due to robbers destroying them while searching for treasures. The tattoos were pricked with a needle introducing black pigment (possibly soot) into the skin. The depictions were created in the Scythian style of stylized interwoven animal motives, as if being wrapped around the body. They were made before the time of the man’s death, possibly in his youth, since there was a layer of fat without any pigment between the tattooed skin and pigment stained muscles. The arms and shoulder blade were covered by real and imaginary creatures, some depicting a fusion between a lion and a griffin, twisted winged figures with a feline tail, creatures with bird and snake heads, a donkey or an onager with a heavily banded back, a mountain ram, a deer and a carnivore. The right leg from below the knee downwards is covered by a fish. From the base of the foot towards the back and alongside the inner side of the calf we can see a horned monster with three bird-like heads, out of which large dots emerged. These and similar shape dots tattooing the warrior’s back are sometimes interpreted as acupuncture points. In talking about the meaning of these tattoos, we have to remember that they were not only applied to men but also to women. Not all powerful individuals buried in the kurgans had their bodies tattooed, indicating particular characteristics specific to tattooed persons (Argent 2013, Polosmak 1999). The presence of the tattoos on the body possibly gave power to the individual since they visualise an explicit link to the ideas and concepts represented by the images.

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FIGURE 4.15 Tattooed male body, Pazyryk, burial mound 2, c. 2,400 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Rudenko 1970).

Interpretations of the specific tattoos vary: the dots are interpreted as having therapeutic function, whereas reasons for the images showing realistic and mythical creatures are more elaborate. Rudenko (1970: 113), after Herodotus, proposed such tattoos as a signifier of noble birth or, following Din-Lin and Kirgiz tradition, as marks of distinction for acts of bravery. Parker-Pearson (1999: 67) proposed that some of the creatures were ‘chimera/griffins’ (a fusion between a lion and a griffin) and ‘predator versus prey imagery’ (deer, carnivore), creating a marker on the individuals’ skin as a protective layer ‘to reinforce the central significance of this boundary between the individual and the chaos beyond, transgressed by the tattooing but therefore protected by those powerful and dangerous entities’. Polosmak (1999: 155) proposes that the tattoos transcend the individual and express the mythological and

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cosmological stories shared by the society, where tattooing allowed passing between the realm of ‘death and resurrection’ in the act of initiation rites. Argent (2013: 190) links tattooing with a culturally-specific relationship between the horse and the human: ‘the living and the dead, this world and the next, and the past, present, and the future were blurred, permeable, and in every sense include horses-not as objects or sets but as individual, relational beings’. These various interpretations do not necessarily contradict each other and can coexist at different levels of meanings for those on whose bodies the tattoos were found. When interpreting tattoos, we need to remember also about their aesthetic qualities since, if they were made outside the Scythian visual tradition, they would not have the power and potency ascribed to them. This point can be well illustrated by moving over 2,000 years forward in time to the body image of David Beckham (Figure 4.16), one of the best known English footballers, demonstrating multiple levels of meaning (beckhamtattoo.com). Beckham’s body has a number of tattoos created by one of the most acclaimed British tattoo artists, Louis Malloy. The biggest tattoos etched into his back are in the shape of an angel: ‘The guardian angel is there to overlook the names of his three children …’ (Malloy 2017). It is most of the time invisible to others and he exposes this figure only when he takes his shirt off. What is important to Beckham is the way the image evokes the power of Christian belief, in which an angel called the Guardian Angel protects the person of whom it is a custodian. Some of his tattoos are visible when he wears a T-shirts, located on his arms and hands. Among these we can see, on his left pinkie finger, the number ‘99’ commemorating the year he got married to his wife Victoria, and winning in a single year the Premier League, the Football Association Cup and UEFA Champions League as a member of the Manchester United football team. Above this, on the upper part of his hand, he has his wife’s name Victoria tattooed, while on the opposite hand the world ‘love’ is visible in the same script. Inside his left arm the name ‘Victoria’ is tattooed using Sanskrit, while above this we see in Hebrew text ‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine’, a further reference to his wife. On the opposite inner part of the lower arm we can see the Roman numeral ‘VII’, indicating his profession and in particular his early career as a football player for Manchester United FC and wearing shirts bearing the number 7. On the inner part of the wrist we see the Roman numerals VIII.V.MMVI, the date of the renewal of his marriage vows. On the outer side of the arm above the wrist we see the words ‘Pray for Me’, tattooed when Beckham was moving to play for the Los Angeles football team LA Galaxy. This is skilfully arranged among the clouds that turn into a Templar Knight associated with the English flag, a red cross on a white background. Below the number VII we see a Latin verse ‘Ut Amem Et Foveam’ (so that I love and cherish) dedicated to his wife, while on the opposite hand he carries ‘Perfectio in Spiritu’ (spiritual perfection). The upper part of his right arm is signified with the image of an angel with the text ‘In the Face of Adversity’, created to signify a difficult time in his marriage. Beckham’s body modifications give us an insight into the ‘layers’ of identity visualisation from very private and individual affiliation (wife and children), to community identity (Manchester United) and global religious belief (Christianity).

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David Beckham’s tattoos (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: David Beckham’s tattoos. beckhamtattoo).

FIGURE 4.16

They are not the result of an instantaneous act of creation, but rather of a process of modifying the body through additions of new images and altering existing ones. They signify in visual form, via body art, a number of associations, links, and mythological and symbolic realities that inform his life. While the tattooed body of David Beckham illustrates the contexts of embodiment in the contemporary world, I think there are resonances with the ancient past. Body modification also reminds us about the dark side of 20th century history, when the prisoners of Nazi concentrations camps were signified by numbers tattooed on to their skin. In this way their tormentors tried to stop them from being recognized as human beings, by replacing the identity of the names given to them by their

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parents, the names that linked them to their ancestors and gave them historical belonging, to the family, community and nation, with a number. As we can see, body modification transcends different cultures and contexts. We can safely say that early art is a part of this phenomenon and the capacity of being human.

Summary Answering the questions I posed at the start of this chapter, ‘who was the first artist’, ‘what is the first art’, ‘what are the first visual images that can be interpreted as being artistic images or objects’, ‘how relevant are Renaissance ideas in comparing the cave paintings of Lascaux to the Sistine chapel’, I argue that Renaissance ideas about art have been challenged by archaeological discoveries and contemporary understanding of visual art. Therefore, we need to keep them in mind as a part of the historical development of the discipline, but use broader and more embracing ideas, such as visual art as a visual metaphors, part of non-verbal communication in a particular space and time, where the first art objects were human bodies created in the process of embodiment. The earliest art object, as discussed above, was the human body that, via its modification, allowed the person to communicate her/his identities as part of an intra or inter community belonging in a similar way to the way we do today. More importantly, from the evidence pointing to our Neanderthal cousins doing the same and using aesthetics as a form of visual communication, is the knowledge that we humans have not been alone in using our bodies as modes of messaging of our affinities, belongings and exclusions. The use of the body as an art object transcends time and space, making the body the most used medium in non-verbal communication spanning over 100,000 years and still being one of the most evocative forms used by contemporary artists. This approach allows us to look at the body, whether Neanderthal, Sungir, Pazyryk or David Beckam, in a similar way as a form of communication that transcends time and culture. What unites is the use of the body in the context of the visualisation of identities. Identifying the first artist, however, remains elusive, since modification of body through tattooing or painting is often done by another person than the individual to whom the body belongs. In the past (since the use of the mirror is relatively late) as well as today, we rely on others to tattoo us or produce professional makeup; so the artist is not the person whose body has been decorated and whose body is an object of modification, but the person who modified it. So, the artist is once more invisible in the archaeological record. Saying that, the next chapter will focus on material culture, figurines created by the artists themselves as self-portraiture embodying visual metaphors.

Bibliography Alexeeva, T. I., and N. O. Bader (eds) (2000). Homo Sungirensis, Upper Palaeolithic Man: Ecological and Evolutionary Aspects of the Investigation, Moscow: Nauchny Mir. Archer, M. (2002). Art since 1960, London: Thames and Hudson.

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5 EMBODIMENT AND DISEMBODIMENT The corporeality of visual art and interwoven landscapes

Introduction In this chapter we move from the gallery of seeing to the agency of art, where material culture/art object is an essential part of social, cultural and symbolic networks. Keeping in mind the ideas from the previous chapters about the body and embodiment, here I will focus on the role of ego and allocentric human figurines alongside sculptures of other beings that played a crucial role in establishing the relationships between locations, landscapes and their inhabitants. Furthermore, I will explore the relationships between different types of images and the materials they were made from, moving beyond the traditional understanding of the constitution of agency. As I have argued, in particular in Chapter 2, it is possible to interpret such unexpected arrangements via contemporary understandings of what visual art is: Instead of pretending to an authoritative originality, post-modern concentrates on the way images and symbols (‘signifiers’) shift or lose their meaning when put in different contexts (‘appropriated’), revealing (‘deconstructing’) the process by which meaning is constructed. And because no set of signifiers, from art to advertising, is original, all are implicated in the ideologies (themselves patterns of language or representation, hence ‘discourses’) of cultures that produce and/or interpret them. (Reed 2003: 272). These ideas allow us to go beyond the established understanding of categorisation of the world whereby the symbolism of fisher-gatherer-hunter communities is closely linked with the natural world, a classification that is firmly rooted in 19th century evolutionary thinking. Here, I propose to open up early European Palaeolithic art to more diverse and unconventional modes of interpretation. By engaging with sculptures from Jōmon Japan, I will look at how they are involved in renewing aspects of socio-economic landscapes. As I argued in

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Chapter 2, such an approach is based on an appreciation of the unique historical and cultural identities of past communities, and frees us from an uncreative and restricting evolutionary framework (Janik 2011). Before discussing actual archaeological data and their interpretation, I add to the concept of embodiment with the introduction of four other ideas: performativity, fragmentation, dividuality and actor-network theory.

The concept of visual narrative The idea of performativity was developed as part of the feminist critiques of the concepts of gender and sex. Butler (1988) proposes that gender, like sex, is culturally performed, and therefore culturally constructed. The best way to illustrate this is to look at how men and women dress or act in society. I am not concerned here as to whether Butler’s contention is right or wrong (Moore 1994), but rather with her idea of the act of performing as underpinning much cultural activity. The notion of fragmentation, incorporating the idea of the secondary agency of material culture, has been a part of archaeological interpretation for over two decades. It was introduced to archaeological interpretation as part of the post-processual critique of processual archaeology, in particular in the work of John Chapman (2000, Brittain and Harris 2010, Jones 2012). Chapman proposed that some material culture has certain specific implicit qualities, some sort of spiritual potency or essence, and that by breaking the object these qualities could be shared. One of the works from which Chapman took this idea of the secondary agency of material culture is Strathern’s The Gender of the Gift (1988). This work is also the source for a third concept to be used in this chapter, that of dividuality. Dividuality points towards numerous relational identities shared and divided between ideas, objects and humans. Fowler (2004: 148) proposes that Each person was a collection of elements from the whole cosmos, a fractal persona that was also dividual to no slight degree. This dividuality could be altered through a version of partible relations during exchange … sharing food, during interactions with prey, and during mortuary practices where the person was extracted from one collective and given to another. To illustrate these concepts and the way they are interwoven into visual images and narratives, let us consider one of the central visual representations of Christianity: Mary, mother of Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ, her son. I have chosen those images to show the pragmatics of such interactions within familiar western cultural contexts to demonstrate how such relationships are not only part of the past or anthropologically studied cultures. Looking at the three images shown in Figure 5.1, on the left we see at first a young woman holding a baby boy in her lap (Figure 5.1a). In the middle is a young man hanging from a cross (Figure 5.1c). The right image (Figure 5.1b) shows a young woman holding a young man in her lap: this is the visual composition of the Pietà, the Virgin Mary holding her son Jesus after he was taken

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FIGURE 5.1 a) unknown artist, Pię kna Madonna z Wrocławia, between c. 1390–1400 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Pię kna Madonna z Wrocławia. Wikipedia); b) Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, Pietà, Rome, 1508–1512, 521–520 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Pietà. Wikimedia); c) Alonzo Cano, Cristo crucificado, 1646 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Cristo crucificado. Wikimedia).

down from the cross. It is probably best known from the marble sculpture carved in 1499 by Michelangelo, today housed in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The man is dead, the woman looks down on him; they look of a similar age. The man and the woman represent Mary and Jesus. The images show Mary as the mother with her young son Jesus (Figure 5.1a), Jesus as a man crucified (Figure 5.1c) and Mary holding the body of her son (Figure 5.1b). The image in figure 5.1b implies a young woman mourning her lover, as there is no difference in age to indicate the

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generational difference between them. There is no father and it is as if she is a single mother. With our understanding of Christianity, we know that the story is of course more complicated: the father is the son, they are the same entity. The body and spirit are also shared by a third party, the Holy Ghost. All three are united as one, the Holy Trinity. The Holy Ghost is represented in visual depictions as a dove. Furthermore, it is believed by Christians that Mary became pregnant without sexual intercourse via the Holy Ghost, and so she is believed to be a virgin. Jesus is both the father and the son. The same god was also portrayed as a stag in Dürer’s engraving St. Eustace, c. 1500–1502 (Figure 5.2b). What we see here is visual imagery that repeats/visually materialises particular ideas (Figure 5.2). Who represents what, and how, is very complex. Furthermore, the image of the cross, the symbol of Jesus’ death, is commonly used by Christians to show that they belong to this particular faith. They perform a symbolic act of belonging to the faith by wearing a cross around their neck; in a sense the cross localises or visually articulates the wearer’s faith. As discussed in Chapter 2, in terms of the corporeality of self, the body as ‘a canvas’ can be used in defining our identity. Such action can be understood as making a visual act to express belonging to this religion. Such acts are not always uncontroversial, in particular in contemporary Europe where overt expressions of faith, from Muslim women covering their faces beneath the burka to Christians wanting to be seen to wear the cross in the workplace, lead to political and industrial disputes. Further acts of performativity including fragmentation and dividuality are acted out during the celebration of the Christian mass. Here the sacred process of transfiguration takes place when the wine is transformed into the blood of Jesus, and bread is transformed into his flesh. Taking communion (dividuality of Jesus) is a shared ritual activity: participants receive the wine from the same cup; they are given small pieces of bread or thin wafers to eat, often broken from a larger loaf or sheet that Catholics believe to be the body of Christ, in a series of ritual acts that refer back to the Last Supper. All Catholics believe that the bread and wine contain the substance of God, the same god who as we saw above, was visually represented as a dove (Figure 5.2a) or a stag (Figure 5.2b), a child (Figure 5.2c) and the man hanging on the cross (Figure 5.2d). The fascination with even more arcane aspects of Christian symbolism can be seen in the phenomenal success of popular fiction such as books by Dan Brown, whose The Da Vinci Code had sold 80 million copies by 2009 (The Da Vinci Code 2014).

Climate, environment and the first European artist The sculptures, in particular the autogenous figurines (as discussed in Chapter 3) presented in this part of the chapter come from three main archaeological sites in central Russia: Avdeevo, Gagarino and Kostenki 1, in particular layer 1, complex 1 (1/1/1)). These sites are dated to the Upper Palaeolithic Pavlovian-Kostenki-Gravettian archaeological culture, covering the area from the northern Pyrenees to the European Plain of Russia (Figure 5.3). Avdeevo is dated from before 22,000 years ago to 15,000

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a) Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Holy Spirit as a Dove, Saint Peter’s Basilica, Rome, c. 1600 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Holy Spirit as a Dove. Wordpress); b) Albert Dürer, fragment, St. Eustace, c. 1501 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: St. Eustace. Wikiart); c) Claude de Jongh, fragment, Saint Lawrence Crowned by Baby Jesus, 1634 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Saint Lawrence Crowned by Baby Jesus. Wikimedia).

FIGURE 5.2

years ago (Gvozdover 1995, Svezhentsev and Popov 1993: 27); Gagarino is dated between 30,000 to 18,000 years ago (Svezhentsev and Popov 1993: 27, Tarasov 1979); and Kostenki 1/1/1, is dated from earlier than 24,000 to 19,000 years ago (Abramova 1962, Klein 1969, 1973, Praslov 2009, Praslov and Rogachev 1982, Svezhentsev and Popov 1993: 28).

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FIGURE 5.3 Location of discoveries of autogenous figurines from northern Pyrenees to the European Plan of Russia.

These sites are all located in contemporary Europe, but the climatic condition they endured were much cooler than today, the winter lasting between six and nine months of the year. The landscape and the climate is characterised as ‘Mammoth Steppe’, which does not have an equivalent in the contemporary environment. It is also called ‘tundra steppe’ since it can be compared to the grassy steppe of southern Russia: The plants of the dry grassland of the ‘mammoth steppe’ were faster growing and more abundant than today’s tundra plants. In addition to various species of grasses, they included dry-ground sedges, small shrubs, such as Arctic sagebrush, and many herbaceous plants including members of the pea, daisy and buttercup families (Lister and Bahn 1995: 74). Such an explanation is somewhat misleading for the non-specialist, as by creating a sense of familiarity it is as if we can simply access the web and look at pictures of contemporary southern Russia with its vast areas of ‘tundra steppe’. What we would not see is the ‘periglaciality’ and aridity of the landscape, which in terms of what was available for animals to eat and people to gather is a combination of contemporary assemblages of plants coming from the heartland steppe and the Arctic Coastal Plain

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(Guthrie 2001). Following Guthrie’s description of the Mammoth Steppe, we need to imagine a landscape that is very arid due to the Tibetan Plateau acting as a barrier to moisture coming from the south, while to the north the sea level was lower and frozen, locking in moisture and exposing the Continental Shelf. To the west the wet weather we experience today did not reach so far north since the Gulf Stream stopped at the latitude of Africa and contemporary Spain, while to the east the North American Ice Sheets further prevented moisture reaching the Mammoth Steppe. The restriction of moisture to the area created almost constant high pressure, with the presence of only occasional clouds. Soil was not well developed and what was there for plants to grow on underwent constant erosion, so plants grew on ground containing many patches free of any vegetation. In the summer the soil was warmer than today but cooler in the winter, temperature differences between winter and summer were stronger than now, and powerful winds swept across drifts of snow and silt, further cooling and drying the air. However, the positive factor of the wind was the blowing away of the snow, exposing plants that provided fodder for mammoths, horses and woolly rhinos that were not able to feed with the snow cover. The sky was clear in the summer, warming the soil and creating favourable conditions for plants with a deeper root system, while increasing aridity further. In the winter, clear skies drew temperatures lower and increased permafrost. The sites that contained the figurines discussed in this chapter are located on the river terraces along the river valleys that cut into the plains of the Mammoth Steppe, where winds were not so strong and the aridity was moderated by the rivers and streams. This was an environmental niche that was colonised by Homo sapiens migrating north. It was the ecological zone richest in plants that were used as food or weaving material (Aranguren et al. 2007, Pryor et al. 2013, Revedin et al. 2010). We need to also understand that the physiology of humans living in those cold environments was possibly different to ours. It is suggested, on the basis of current research on Siberian native populations who are descendants of the first modern humans occupying the cold areas of prehistoric Europe discussed in this chapter, that there were four mechanisms for keeping warm, associated with ‘short-term acclimatisation and genetic adaptation’ (Leonard et al. 2005: 466). First, the metabolic rate of those populations is higher, which helps keep people warm. Second, the high consumption of animal products is moderated by low lipid levels, which prevent cardiovascular diseases. Third, they do not shiver when cold, so energy is not lost in such motion but is used to keep body the warm. Fourth, the mechanism of opening the blood vessels increasing the temperature of the extreme body parts, such as fingers, by boosting the warm blood flow, is suppressed (Cardona et al. 2014, Leonard et al. 2005). So, an environment that would be described by us as cold and harsh was probably not so daunting for prehistoric people. Within these environmental and climatic settings, Upper Palaeolithic art and personal ornamentation differs from one region to another, as one would expect in the long time span of this archaeological period, reflecting the cultural preferences of the communities living in those areas (Soffer and Conkey 1997). The art of the Russian

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Plain area is consistent, without the hiatus seen in the other regions in Europe, and belongs to the Central and East European Upper Palaeolithic. One can still argue, of course, that Palaeolithic communities were not as technologically developed as us, and therefore one cannot compare us with them. I would suggest that their strategies were most successful, since they lived generation after generation in such a harsh environment. We are not immune to the influence of the climate ourselves. It affects us despite our technologies and, just as were past communities, every year we are affected by disasters caused by floods, hurricanes and tornados. The weather is a part of the world we live in, but is not the main reason why and how we interact with that world now and in the past, nor is it the reason why we create visual art in the forms we do.

Sculpture The female figurines discussed in the context of the Mammoth Steppe are generally divided into three categories (Figure 5.4). The first is the anthropomorphic figurine (Figure 5.4a), where, although we can see that it is an image of the human form, there is no indication of the sex of the depiction. The next two categories can be defined as female images, two of which comprises the so-called ‘Venus’ statuettes (Figures 5.4b,

Palaeolithic figurines. a) unknown artist, Mal’ta, female figurine, c. 24,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny); b) unknown artist, Mal’ta, female figurine, c. 24,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny); c) unknown artist, Kostenki 1, complex 1, layer 1, female figurine, c. between 28,000 to 20,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

FIGURE 5.4

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5.4c). However, only figurines 5.4c belongs to the category of self-portraiture/ autogenous figurine discussed in Chapter 3, the pregnant female. Despite having all the attributes of ‘Venus’, most notably large hips and breasts, figurines such as that in Figure 5.5b lack three-dimensionality where the breasts are concerned, an essential aspect in looking at oneself. There are other differences too. These objects are rather two-dimensional, with carved lines indicating features of Venus figurines that are made by someone looking at another person rather than at themselves. Secondly, they have faces (Figures 5.4a, 5.4b). Thirdly, some of them look like pendants (Figure 5.4a), indicating a very different use for female representation. At the sites discussed here, two types of figurine of pregnant women can be identified: those which are ‘self-portraits’/autogenous sculpture, created by the women themselves, and those which are produced by others, the copies. The first category embodies the sculptress’s body, while the second category is a copy of this body that could have been made by a woman or a man. The second category, however, do not possess the characteristics of self-portraiture as discussed in the previous chapter (Figure 5.5).

Autogenous sculpture and its copies. a) unknown artist, female figurine, Kostenki 1, complex 1, layer 1, between c. 28,000 to 20,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny); b) unknown artists, Kostenki 1, complex 1, layer 1, female figurine and fragmented female figurines, between c. 28,000 to 20,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Abramova 1962 and Efimenko 1958).

FIGURE 5.5

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Both anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figurines and their fragments were discovered in a variety of contexts. Some were found in activity areas within cultural layers (Abramova 1962, Efimenko 1958, Gvozdover 1995, Tarasov 1979), while others were placed in their own ‘houses’. Some appear to have been ritually fragmented, while others were found almost intact. Their treatment and depositional context differs somewhat from site to site. In addition, their treatment according to the material they were made of was specific to the site from which they came.

Kostenki 1, layer 1, complex 1 The archaeological assemblage from Kostenki 1/1/1 has been fully published (Abramova 1962), allowing us to study the treatment of the figurines in relation to the material from which they were made. Radiocarbon dates from Kostenki 1/1/1 range from around 28,000 to 20,000 years ago (Svezhentsev and Popov 1993: 28). The Kostenki 1 site is one among over 20 sites located on the left bank of the Don River between the villages of Kostenki and Borshchevo. The habitation layers at Kostenki 1/1/1 measure c. 38 m x c. 24 m, and contain between 9 and 11 hearths located in the middle, creating an axis of the site (Figure 5.6). Different activity areas can be detected from the concentration of bone, flint and anther tools. On the edges of the occupational area a number of pits were found. Four have been interpreted as pit-houses, while the remains of meat and bones in the other pits point to their use for storage. Some of the figurines and their fragments were found in the cultural layer of the pithouses and pits located in them. They were also located in the habitation layer as well as in the ‘cache pits’, placed in the centre of the site. Along with figurines and their fragments these ‘cache pits’ also contained a number of other artefacts including diadems, bracelets, pendants and flint blades, while the occupational layer contained thousands of flint, bone and anther objects. Overall 19 figurines not ritually broken in any act of fragmentation have been found on the site. They are depictions of mammoth (10), rhino (2) and mammoth/rhino (3), and are made out of marl. The non-fragmented figurines (where the torso is not broken) made out of mammoth tusk are autogenous statuettes (4). Given this assessment, I suggest that in the case of the figurines, since they are self-portraits created by the sculptress looking at her own body, it is the torso and not the face that is of most importance (Janik 2012, 2013, 2014). The torso always shows the body in passive position, there is movement embodied into the carving (Figure 5.4), which is important when considering early sculpture in the neuroaesthetic understanding of visual communication. Since we do not see the face, we rely on the act of looking at the body, which implies physical action as dynamic information of what to expect and how we might emotionally relate to a particular body position (App et al. 2012). Here we see a passive state of the body that does not imply any interaction with the viewer, but rather implies self-absorption via looking at oneself.

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FIGURE 5.6 Plan of the settlement Kostenki 1, complex 1, layer 1, containing hearths, pit-houses, pits and distribution of variety of figurines fragments; checker – fireplaces, lines – living areas, white – storage areas, grey – activity areas (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Abramova 1962, Efimenko 1958 and Iakovleva 1999).

The patterns of breakage need further analysis in the future but it appears that three figurines out of four are missing their heads. An important question is when did the breakage happen? It seems that the fourth figurine had its head broken off recently and subsequently put back. Of the other three, one appears to have been broken recently, one a long time ago, the last one is unclear. The likeness of cave lion (7), rhino/or horse (1), horse (2), bear (6), wolf (1), and bird (14) were always found as fragments alongside the fragmented depictions of human females (68). The process of fragmentation is apparent here and performed on other artistic representations, excluding that of the mammoth.

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FIGURE 5.7 Unknown artist, Kostenki 1, complex 1, layer 1, female figurine, between c. 28,000 to 20,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

Fragmented depictions of females have been found in different depositional contexts. One example of a seemingly unfinished female autogenous figurine made out of marl is particularly interesting. It was found in three fragments. One fragment was deposited in a pit while the other two were found in cultural layers (Figure 5.7). Unfinished female figurines which were deliberately broken in the past however, due to archaeological principles regarding the reconstruction of broken things, the figurine has been reassembled reflecting its original state, but not the intentionality of the members of the prehistoric community. At Kostenki 1, complex 2, layer 1, (Kostenki 1/2/1) a large fragment of an autogenous figurine made out of marl was ritually deposited: The statuette stood on a thin layer of silt on which had been placed three large chunks of burned bone (the primary fuel at the site) a broken ivory diadem with complex geometric decoration, a series of bone plaques, and two dozen flint tools. Following the placement of the objects, the pit had been filled with mixture of fine silt and red ochre and the 12-centimeter opening had been covered with the shoulder-blade of a woolly mammoth. For the excavator Nicolai Praslov, this pit was a fully heated, ritual dwelling with mammoth-bone roof constructed especially for the statuette. (White 2003: 138)

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Other figurine fragments have been found in the pit which was ‘open for a long time and filled up with rubbish consisting of broken bones and artefacts mixed with ash from the heaths and windblown silt’ (Cook 2013: 78). The full account of the way figurines were treated at Kostenki 1/1/2 is very difficult to ascertain as the site was only published in a very summary fashion, a situation compounded by the untimely death of the excavator, Nicolai Praslov. There is an interesting pattern discernible in which figurines, or parts of figurines, remain on site, and which categories of figurine or parts of figurine, through their absence from the archaeological record, can be assumed to have been taken off site. Through analysis of patterns of deposition and presence/ absence, we can begin to see how particular categories of figurine or figurine fragments emphasise not only the act of fragmentation but also the act of belonging to a particular location, somewhat analogous to the sense of belonging to the Christian faith alluded to above. Among the figurines and fragments left behind at Kostenki 1/1/1, we can see a striking relationship between body parts and the style of representation to which they belong. Within the total of 104 fragments, heads and head fragments belonging to all categories of representation are present. Furthermore, since the human heads and their fragments display the same visual canon as seen in the female figurines, a face in outline without any other elements, e.g. eyes or nose, I suggest they belong to the representations of women. The human female and the rhino are the only two categories of being represented on the site through body fragments, torso, legs etc. as well as by heads. Other creatures are only represented by the head. The female and rhino representations transcend the distinction between the type of fragments left on the site and those taken off site, since their heads, like those of the cave lion, rhino, horse, bear, wolf, horse and bird, were also found on site.

Performativity, fragmentation and dividuality at Kostenki 1 The significance of female representations is further highlighted when we look at the relationship between the head and the face. Complete or fragmentary female figurines lack faces, while the fragments representing other creatures, and which had been left on site, have heads with facial features depicted. I suggest that this shows that the act of performativity occurred in the process of fragmentation. Depending on what the figurine represented, the substance they embodied was taken away in fragments removed from the site. However, in the case of female figurines, the substance embodied in parts of the whole body was left behind. This relationship between representation, fragmentation and the material the figurines are made of brings me to the concept of dividuality. What is related to what, how and when, is most clearly visible when looking at the material the figurines are made of. The figurines are made from two kinds of material, mammoth tusk/ivory and marl. Modern archaeologists recognise that one of these materials comes from a once-living creature, the mammoth, and the second is

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an inert mineral (Figure 5.8). Although it is not possible to assume that in the Palaeolithic these two materials were understood according to these contemporary categorisations, or that the Palaeolithic artists distinguished between marl as rock sediment and mammoth tusk as organic material, we can make some observations about the associations these two materials may have had through considering differences in what was made from each material. The mammoth tusk is used only in creating the autogenous figurines by the women whose self-portraits they represent. Furthermore, by not carving faces on the figurines, the women chose neither to be recognised nor to communicate meaning via facial expressions (Janik 2012, 2013, 2014), although faces were present on fragmentary figurines representing the others: cave lion, rhino, horse, bear, wolf, horse and bird. The social signification of these choices, which informed the act of making these figurines, cannot be underestimated in the process of defining ‘the self’ and ‘the other’. This is seen in the creative act of embodiment in the material of ‘the other’ in the process of creative transformation from egocentric to the allocentric perspective. The ‘other’ in this case is the mammoth, which is related to the autogenous figurines through its real physical

FIGURE 5.8 Unknown artist, Kostenki 1, complex 2, layer 1, mammoth, between c. 28,000 to 20,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

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material of tusk and the lack of the act of fragmentation performed on its carved representation despite being made out of marl. The dividuality of the female figures and mammoth, the relationships that are and are not shared between different creatures and the materials used in making these representations, provides a multirelational pattern of past associations and connections underlying figurine production, use and meanings (Figure 5.9). The substance shared with other carved representations is marl. The dividuality of mammoth and female goes even further, since the representations of females also shares the material of marl with representations of mammoth, cave lion, rhino, horse, bear, wolf, horse and bird (Figure 5.10). The representations of the human female, in this case the self-portraiture, undergo the same performative act of fragmentation as do all the other representations, except those of mammoth and rhino. The presence of rhino in the archaeological assemblage is very small. It is, therefore, difficult to describe exactly the rhino’s relationships with and to other representations, but it appears to be an intermediate creature, represented by a fragment representing rhino/horse; unbroken figurines of mammoth/rhino were always made out of marl. Furthermore, the act of performativity was restricted to the ritual deposition of female figurines and their fragments, further distinguishing them from the other figural representations.

Avdeevo At Avdeevo, these relationships and acts of fragmentation are similar to those seen at Kostenki 1/1/1 (Gvozdover 1995). Radiocarbon dates from the site range from 19,000 to 27,000 years ago (Svezhentsev and Popov 1993: 27). The distribution of pit-houses, pits and activity areas is similar to Kostenki 1/1/1. Ten figurines, one fragmentary, were found made out of mammoth tusk. This act of fragmentation of a self-portrait performed on a figurine carved from tusk created a link with another 15 fragments of female figurines that were made from marl. It has to be acknowledged here that the nature of mammoth tusk is such that it separates, flakes off, and is easy to break, which could have influenced the state of preservation, so that the figurine could disintegrate by this process. The way they look is similar to the statuettes from Kostenki 1/1/1, despite them being made out of mammoth tusk, while one of the figurines made of marl looks like a Kostenki 1/1/1 equivalent made in ivory, although it is missing its head and lower legs. The material from which both the female figurines and the mammoths were made at Avdeevo is the same, namely sandstone, indicating a relationship expressed through a shared material from which they were made. The two sandstone depictions of mammoth were not broken, although the female figurines made of the same material were broken (Figure 5.11). The significance of shared material of manufacture at Avdeevo is thus somewhat different to the situation at Kostenki 1/1/1. One figurine is made out of a mammoth joint or vertebra, not tusk. The mammoth material is shared further,

FIGURE 5.9 Unknown artist, Kostenki 1, complex 1, layer 1, female figurine, between c. 28,000 to 20,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

FIGURE 5.10 Sharing substance of a marl. Unknown artists, Kostenki 1, complex 1, layer 1, fragmented bird, bear, cave lion, mammoth, human female figurines, between c. 28,000 to 20,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Abramova 1962 and Efimenko 1958).

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FIGURE 5.11 Mammoth made out of marl. Unknown artist, Avdeevo, mammoth, between c. 22,000 to 17,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

since one zoomorphic figurine representing a horse is also made out of mammoth tusk (Figure 5.12). In contrast to the zoomorphic depictions at Kostenki 1/1/1, where almost exclusively only animal heads are present, at Avdeevo we have the body of a horse, legs and torso without the head.

Performativity, fragmentation and dividuality at Avdeevo The dividuality of the female figurines from Avdeevo in relation to other creatures and materials suggests a different pattern than at Kostenki 1/1/1, and brings into focus different multi-relational configurations, as well as how different kinds of relationships interrelate with different performative acts on the site. Fragmentation as a performative act of breaking female figurines made out of mammoth tusk is exclusive to Avdeevo, while unbroken representations of mammoth made out of stone are the same at both sites. Their deposition, however, follows the act of performativity where some figurines and their fragments were ritually placed in pits, as at Kostenki 1/1/1. The horse figurines, on the other hand, are the one form of representation at Avdeevo that relates to both female figurines and mammoths by the material of which they are made (Figure 5.12), as well as to female figurines by the act of fragmentation, and represents the intermediate creature such as the rhino in Kostenki 1/1/1.

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Sharing substance of a mammoth between a human female and a horse. a) unknown artist, Avdeevo, human female, between c. 22,000 to 17,000 years old (redrawn and amended by Szczę sny); b) unknown artist, Avdeevo, horse, between c. 22,000 to 17,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

FIGURE 5.12

Gagarino At Gagarino, fragmentation, performativity and dividuality suggest a different constellation of relationships to those seen at Kostenki 1/1/1 or Avdeevo. At first it was thought that the three figurines found during excavations from 1927 were deposited in the niches of the house walls. However, subsequent reassessment of the data and new excavations specified the precise locations of all figurines and their fragments, including those found in the 1920s and 1960s, into the cultural layers of the oval house (4 x 4.5 m) and two pits adjacent to it (Tarasov 1979). Randall White writes that all female figurines looking pregnant were deposited each in a single niche dug into the wall of the pit house (White 2003: 141). The distance between the niches was similar. In a pit adjacent to the dwelling more figurines were found, this time associated with the articulated foot bones of foxes. Since such foot bones often remain on carnivore furs after skinning, it is possible that the statuettes had been wrapped in fox pelts. His description is probably based on the assessment of excavations in 1927 that were reinterpreted by Tarasov in the 1970s, suggesting that there were no niches in the house, but that the figurines were found in the occupational layers in the house. The house was further interpreted as a birthing house since the figurines look like pregnant

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women (Tarasov 1979). Alternatively, the house can be recognized as the residence of the sculptress or sculptresses of female figurines, as one of the objects was not finished and can be interpreted as a work in progress. Moreover, discovered in another domestic context at Gagarino, is one of the most unusual finds. A mammoth tusk had its opposing ends carved into two separate figurines. One of them looks as if pregnant or heavily pregnant, while the second has not been carved yet (Figure 5.13). The figures are not finished but one of them is already missing the lower legs and feet. This find further supports the interpretation of the building as a sculptress’s workshop or residence. Looking at the Gagarino house from a slightly different perspective, what is striking is the veneration of women – but not of just any woman. Veneration in these particular cases is linked to the woman as an artist whose body, as on the other sites, through the creative act of self-portraiture undergoes the process of transformation from ego to allocentric. Such an understanding allows us to reach the individual woman, someone who was as real as any of us.

FIGURE 5.13 Unknown artist, Gagarino, human females, between c. 30,000 to 18,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

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There are no zoomorphic figurines and figurines are only made of mammoth tusk, suggesting a specific focus on the relationship between the mammoth and the Palaeolithic sculptresses creating self-portraits from mammoth ivory. Fourteen pieces representing the female body have been found: five finished and four unfinished, two in the process of being carved as one double figurine, one anthropomorphic head and three fragments. The mammoth is present as a material (tusk) rather than in representation, and there are no other creatures visible in sculptural form. One of the figurines, the so-called dancing figurine, represents the body in movement rather than in a static and passive position (Figure 5.14). The tilting of the head indicates looking down at the body, the hands are stretched along the torso, under the breasts covering her belly we see an ‘apron’; the movement of the figurine is linked with the way the legs are situated, one against the other. The results of how we see this figurine are similar to those found at Kostenki and Avdeevo: they are passive and the figure is engaged with herself rather than the viewer.

Performativity, fragmentation and dividuality at Gagarino Dividuality in the light of the patterns at Gagarino suggests a rather different multi-layered relationship between female, mammoth and other creatures than that seen on the other sites. The female figurines stand on their own here since

‘Dancing figurine’. Unknown artist, Gagarino, human female, between c. 30,000 to 18,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

FIGURE 5.14

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there are no other representations on the site, making the Gagarino assemblage unique. It does, however, share the pattern of deposition with the other sites, as well as the relationship between the mammoth, as the material used in figurine production, as at Kostenki 1/1/1. All three sites are united by acts of performativity, fragmentation and dividuality, through the carvers’ acts of creating egocentric/self-representations that become allocentric/embodiments of others, through the ritual treatment of the figurines, and through their relationship to the mammoth. What links the sites is the process of fragmentation: what is broken and what is not, what is left on the site and what is not. This is performed on different figurines representing the human female, cave lion, rhino, horse, bear, wolf and bird. Their relationships as dividual entities unite and separate them between sites by the material used to create them, as well as the acts of fragmentation or lack thereof.

The body from ego to allocentric Taking the neuroaesthetic perspective introduced in earlier chapters, the body is at once conceptualised and at the same time gives references to the ‘corporeality of self’ (Arzy et al. 2006, Ruby and Decety 2001). The neuroaesthetic properties of our brain that allows an artist to explore the body in ways that we are able to relate to, can also evoke either a positive or negative affinity towards it. This is explored by Antony Gormley in a number of his sculptures (Figure 5.15). Gormley translates the neurophysiological capacities within each of us through the repeated representation of self, and through which process he seeks to ascribe (or describe) the human condition in the world. He uses his own body as a metaphor for communicating issues and concerns of the time and space he occupies in the world in which he lives. The British sculptor, whose naked form has been cast and displayed across the world, speaks to Libby Powell about masculinity, movement and the adventure of being human. You so often cast your male figure as standing straight, tall and proud – in an environment where absent fathers are blamed for rioting children, and where urban life moves us further away from traditional male functions. How do you see the evolving role of the male figure in today’s world? In some senses there is no figure, just a space/place where a body once was. Perhaps that body’s sexuality is less important than its verticality. The bodies are male, they are gendered, but you have to take more account of where it is placed and to where it is looking. The verticality of the body against the horizontality of the horizon is critical. I’m not sure if these works present an ideal of maleness or more usefully question the things that the traditional statue has stood for and indeed the whole notion of the standing of a statue. My body is a found object. I would like to think the bodysurrogates I make from it are as vulnerable as they are resistant. Resistant to

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time but in dialogue with time. They are about feeling, about a reconciliation of the uniqueness and aloneness of every human in birth and death, while being open to everything that can happen in-between. We have now evolved from the duty of art to simply mirror a retinal image of the world to something more critical, something that moves behind the appearance of things. I am trying to work in the space between the standing of a statue and the object-nature of a sculpture asking what kind of job it can do. I’m interested in how we might project exactly those qualities of maleness and find them confounded. Speaking personally, I think that gender is something that is made, not given, and I think we are exploring what we mean by the various textures and complexions of masculinity. I am attracted by the notion of the male who goes out against all odds and gets the bacon. As a model it doesn’t quite work anymore, even though there are plenty of so-called alpha males out there. I think my nakedness, or the nakedness of my sculpture, is more to do with exposure than to do with sexuality, more about vulnerability than dominance. As you reproduce and exhibit the human form, do you do so with a sense of pride in being human? More with a sense of asking what it is to be human and how we, as an animal, turned out this way. We are the most vertical animal, our spines have become a vertical column. When we walk we do so not with security of four limbs but by constantly recovering from falling. What do we do with our verticality? We look out towards the eyes of others of our species and the horizon. The verticality of the bodies in Another Place, Another Time, Time Horizon and Horizon Field has to be put against the opposite that is to be found in the arrested and falling bodies of Critical Mass. Critical Mass is an acknowledgement of the dark side of human nature; an acknowledgement of the 20th century as a century in which the industrialization of killing has become commonplace and the way in which, as Foucault suggests, the public spectacle of pain has been introverted. I believe the mind-body instrument is an infinitely extendable tool and that the adventure of being human is far from over. This work is about fallout as an internalized public spectacle, the internal conditions of depression, the secrecy of Western torture and the special renditions that have characterized both the Iraq and Afghan campaigns that are in some senses the true cost of a continued Western hegemony. Critical Mass is an important critical balance to the traditional assumption that the social duty of sculpture (as the most public of the arts) is statue making that celebrates the structures of power and the status quo. I wish to use it to undermine, question and objectify the negative energies within the purposes of the West. Some of your work costs hundreds of thousands of pounds to create. Is there a role for such art in times of recession and austerity?

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This continued obsession with maintaining our world power – Britain’s alliance with France in the Libya campaign and the US in the Iraq wars – is based on a continuation of the deployment of the latest instruments of aggression that are a result of a burgeoning arms industry. The possibility of using, often, the same materials and indeed the same industries (of ordnance and steel production) to make benign objects that investigate the collectivity and singularity of human experience seems to me utterly justifiable. Art, while feeding off the economics of its time, has to be independent of economics. Truth, value and meaning do not come from amounts of money spent, or not spent, on their production or consumption, but the intentionality of the works and what they attempt to explore or expose. Every work is an attempt to make an account of its time and place. We have now evolved from the duty of art to simply mirror a retinal image of the world to something more critical, something that moves behind the appearance of things. The work then becomes a critical tool in the balancing of life and becomes a space of exchange and interrogation of words, images and meaning. (Powell 2011, journalist questions in italic) While reflecting on the interview with Gormley, how we can explore interpretation of prehistoric art? Modern sculpture can inspire us to think outside the box, and prompt us to look for the ideas of past artists and the concerns they

FIGURE 5.15 Autogenous sculpture. Antony Gormley, Reflection, 2001 at 350 Euston Road, London (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

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sought to capture in the visual art they produced. By moving from the sphere of the individual into that of culture, the social and symbolic metaphors embodied in the sculptures, we start to see the body’s capacity to act as a metaphor of concerns/ideas that were part of the world of the prehistoric artist, just as their modern equivalents are described in the work of Antony Gormley. For both Gormley and our prehistoric sculpture, the materiality of the artist’s medium plays an important role. As we have already discussed, the creation of gender can be considered to be a construct rather than a given (Butler 1988). This is a concept that seems to be reflected in Gormley’s idea of ‘Resistant to time but in dialogue with time’ and that could be seen to sum up the autogenous sculptures. Contemporary understandings of the Palaeolithic sculptures actively reflect the time and place in which they are interpreted, in the same way that they were in the past, and were understood as an active representation of their time and place of creation. This active representation changes: in the 20th century so-called Venus figurines were seen to reflect the evolutionary development of human societies, in which representations of women were viewed as fertility symbols, life-giving beings and objects of male desire, as previously discussed in Chapter 3. In the late 20th century the figurines acted as a medium through which to question assumptions about the place of women in the past and the sculptures were reinterpreted in this light. I suggest that, in the past, these figurines were active instruments in the constitution and reconstitution of the social and symbolic realities of Upper Palaeolithic Europe. Within such an interpretive frame, factors such as how they were made, the material from which they were made and their treatment are essential to our understanding of the past as an independent historical and cultural milieu distinctly different to our own (Janik 2011, 2012). Furthermore, as we have observed in the work of Gormley discussed above, nakedness and its ability to communicate human states is an important concept for the artist. In the next section I will show how nakedness can also disguise other forms of recognition and how, in the case of Palaeolithic sculptresses, the lack of visibility of the most recognisable and communicative part of our body – the face – also has a neurophysiological basis.

The brain and the artistic choices Thinking about non-verbal communication as an aim of visual art in the context of neurophysiology, the importance of the human face becomes apparent. The general lack of depiction of faces in Palaeolithic sculpture is interesting. In the neuroaesthetic context there is an important distinction between being recognised in visual communication via facial expression and recognition of a generic body (Haxby et al. 2000). Facial recognition is an aspect of non-verbal communication, and we know from research in neurophysiology that activity related to our recognition of face is located in various areas of the brain: the inferior frontal gyrus, the posterior superior temporal sulcus and the middle temporal gyrus (Haxby and

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Gobbini 2011, Haxby et al. 2000, Kitada et al. 2013), which allow us to see and recognise straight away someone’s mood and emotional expression. If one smiles, the facial features alter allowing the emotions of happiness, joy or sadness to be communicated non-verbally. When we are sad our faces show it and there is no need to verbally express how we feel because it is visible, ‘written on our face’. We can also ‘read the lips’ when, by looking at the lips, we can recognise words without hearing them. The emotional clues embedded in the particular configuration of facial muscles allow us to establish the way we might approach someone with a happy or sad face. Furthermore, each face is unique: even identical twins differ in this regard. This is essential in the recognition of our physical identity by others. The way artists use or do not use this ability can be understood within neuroaesthetics as the artist’s choice. This in turn gives us a clue to the artist’s intention of communication, or lack of it, via the visual medium of the face. Those choices can be best illustrated and explained through the idea of art as: first, the neurophysiological capabilities of our bodies; and second, the culturally based choices that allow us to make sense of the world around us. As we can see, we are wired, so to speak, to recognise faces by the neurophysiological properties of our brains and, since we are surrounded by faces and their expressions from the time of birth, we can do it without taking much time. It is therefore significant that neither the artists that created the prehistoric female figurines nor contemporary sculptures by Gormley produced faces. In the absence of recognisable faces, Gormley moves beyond his own place in the world, by being unrecognisable to others, and moves from an egocentric to an allocentric perspective (Sudo et al. 2012). This change in perspective is linked with higher-cognitive functions of the brain. As Candidi et al. (2012: 110) argue the ‘use of the term embodiment to refer to the capacity to understand or rerepresent the states of others by linking them to states related to one’s own body, either at the embodiment level directly, or via a representation of one’s own body at the embodiment level’. This suggests to me that they had or have no intention to be recognised by anyone else. This artistic choice was made not to employ this particular cognitive ability in creating self-images. In this way recognition of the creator of a particular figurine or sculpture was denied to the other members of the society. There is just one exception that in a sense supports the second characteristic of self-body portraiture in sculpture. In the lowest pit at Avdeevo, three figurines were found with a number of particular items: Among them were two shovels, a large quadrangular wand of ivory, an imitation of a wolf metapodial in ivory, and a large flint blade. The microscopic observation of the pit enabled us to come to the conclusion that the pit was not a simple storage place for valuable artefacts, but rather a place with ritual-magical operations. (Gvozdover 1995: 25)

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Unknown artists, Avdeevo, female figurines, between c. 22,000 to 17,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

FIGURE 5.16

Two figurines were placed at the bottom of the pit, one on top of the other (Figure 5.16). They lay back to back, one figurine lying ‘face’ down, while the other was placed with her head on the heels of the other, with its face looking up. This is the only autogenous figurine with recognisable facial features. A third figurine was placed nearby in the same pit. Figurine 5.17 from Avdeevo has a head with a well-represented face. The head, however, is tilted as if looking down, so the face itself is not fully visible. The back of the neck indicates the lowering of the back of the head creating ‘foreshortening’ of the image of the chin, as if the figurine were looking at the front of her body in the same way that McDermott (1996) and McDermott and McCoid (1996) have suggested that a woman would turn her head while looking at the front part of her own body, a feature of other figurines. The sight of this face is exceptional. Its significance lies in the importance of seeing what is probably the first image representing someone who creates an artistic expression of herself, rather than being the image of another person created by someone else. It also supports very strongly the idea that the women were among the first artists. Furthermore, the way the body has been carved looks passive, displaying a lack of engagement with the other, the viewer.

The naked (and almost) undressed body In the context of these and other sites in the Upper Palaeolithic Europe, autogenous figurines are mainly naked, like Gormley’s casts. Sometimes only a very small amount of clothing is shown. In Western Europe this includes string skirts and belts resting low on the hips. In Eastern and Central Europe belts are worn around the waist (Figure 5.17), and there are basketry hats, as well as bandeau above the breasts and around the neck, wrist bands and necklaces (Soffer et al. 2000), while the rest of the body remains uncovered. In regard to this minimalist clothing, according to Soffer: ‘the nature of the data at hand permits us only to suggest that, however delimited, these status positions,

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FIGURE 5.17 Western and Eastern European Palaeolithic sense of dress. a) unknown artist, Lespugue, female figurine, between c. 26,000 and 24,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny); b) unknown artist, Kostenki 1, complex 2, female figurine, between c. 28,000 to 20,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

at least during Gravettian times, were restricted to particular category of social females’ (Soffer et al. 2000: 24). We can see here how the use of clothing or its elements contribute to establishing visual indexation that relates to the women’s identity, socially and culturally defined meanings (Entwistle 2015: 7). We do not know if looking at someone else’s body was restricted. Depictions of dressed humans from Upper Palaeolithic carvings of La Marche, as well as material remains of clothing from graves at Sungir indicate elaborate and well-designed clothing offering protection from cold, wind and strong sun. There is a deliberate choice being made to carve and to be carved naked, which from our understanding of the construction of the concept of gender is very interesting. While carvings of the body and creating autogenous sculpture may not construct the category of gender itself, it is in the way these objects were deposited and disembodied that they become culturally defined items. Conroy (1993) suggested that the production of standardised female figurines is related to the gendering of society, as if standardisation of the female body through the production of figurines is a vehicle for gendering the social construction of societies. This can be understood as a process of gender construction as a performative act, as proposed by Butler (1988), that in the context of the creation of autogenous figurines is a process of representing gender, sex and body materialisation by women artists themselves. What is also important here is the sense of ‘dress’ which does not cover the nakedness of the body but creates identity and in which ‘the ubiquitous nature of dress would seem to point to the fact that dress or adornment is one of the means by which bodies are made social and given meaning and identity’ (Entwistle 2015: 7). In such an

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interpretation, embodiment – as discussed in previous chapters – is a medium in the relationship between the self and the world, ‘I am conscious of my body via the world’ (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 94). In trying to interpret gender, I would like here to embrace a viewpoint presented by Moore, whose interpretation of gender encompasses most strongly for me the understanding of prehistoric art. In the case of this chapter and Upper Palaeolithic figurines: If our universal particularity is to be significant, and if we are to achieve anything as a collective singularity, then we must best strive towards an understanding of embodied subjectivity which does not privilege gender and sexual difference unduly just because we are uncertain about what else it is, if anything, that we share. (Moore 1994: 27) In the light of this view point I would suggest that creating an image of oneself is not creating a gender category itself, and furthermore we need to look at other possibilities structuring and underlying the meaning of Palaeolithic art in Europe that go beyond complementary binary oppositions between male and female (cf Laming-Emperaire 1959, Leroi-Gourhan 1968, Poor 2010). However, when we choose to show the body in any form, or give it to someone else, or to break it in a social act of display and destruction, the cultural categorisation of self through the creation of autogenous sculpture is brought into social signification. Furthermore, if this process is also linked to other creatures, the self is transformed into a communal or social act of signification, part of which might be about gender. As we can see, these Palaeolithic artists were not ordinary women; their artistic abilities, and often pregnancy, made them objects of veneration and possibly cultural signification. I would suggest that these women expressed the concerns (positive or negative) of their societies (as contemporary artists do today) and/or possessed particular qualities that were specifically prized by the communities of which they were a part of. By breaking these figurines, artists or other community members could take away some of the ‘concerns’ as captured in particular art objects. I would suggest, following Chapman’s argument, that this was comparable to the essence of these women, just as relics of saints or medallions with the image of God or saints are carried in many western societies. Our technologies allow us to copy, and multiply images. Most of us no longer buy relics to secure good fortune or save us from diseases. We often have T-shirts bearing the name of the music band to which we feel an affinity or a charitable cause we support. Young people put posters of their idols on the wall, sometimes simply because they look good, but most often because of the ideas these images carry. I suggest it was similar in prehistory. The concerns of culture and society have changed but, as with prehistoric sculptures, the contemporary artist uses the same neurophysiological abilities to

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convey to us the message trapped in her or his body, and by disembodiment we use our abilities in constructing and reconstructing the norms and categories they communicate.

Fragmented bodies The fragmentation of figurines, by the artist or others, was an emotionally charged act that may have had the effect of reinforcing the neuroaesthetic properties of the figurines. If we remember that these autogenous figurines may have been coloured with the application of pigments, we add an additional neuroaesthetic property which would act to focus attention on the objects themselves. In the act of breaking the figurine, parts of the red or black surface become white, reinforcing the significance of the act of breaking through the creation of a new visual quality. Here, I propose that a third aspect of self-portraiture through embodiment in sculpture in the Upper Palaeolithic is fragmentation of the body into different body parts. The process of human body fragmentation is a form of non-verbal communication used for thousands of years and is well documented in the archaeological record, for example in the prehistoric Japanese Jōmon culture discussed later in this chapter, and is still practised in the contemporary world. The

FIGURE 5.18 Kinetic sculpture. Jim Bond, Giant Leap, 2005, photograph by John Coombes (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Courtesy of the artist. © Jim Bond).

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aspect of body fragmentation as visual expression that carries defined and particular meanings can be seen in votive offerings found in some Catholic churches today. Thanksgiving for being healed is represented by the parts of the body that were ‘ill’ and have been cured by the mercy of God. Representations of these body parts are presented to the church depicting legs, arms, etc., where they are displayed to show human gratitude for God’s love and mercy. Looking from a neuroaesthetic perspective, the process of fragmentation has been exploited by the artist Jim Bond (Figure 5.18), whose kinetic sculptures break the body up and bring it together again in a process of embodiment and fragmentation. As with the previous aspects, I suggest that this lies in the relationship between our neurophysiological capacities of perceiving disembodiment and culturally defined practice. In the archaeological record we have more fragments of female figurines than complete examples. I argue that embodiment by creating autogenous representations of self is deconstructed in the case of Venus autogenous figurines by the act of fragmentation, where the figurines are broken and the embodiment is transformed in the act of disembodiment.

Palaeolithic visual vocabulary I propose here that gendered female sculptures can be interpreted in the context of landscape (Janik 2014). The material culture/art objects/figurines are not static, but by undergoing the acts of fragmentation, performativity and dividuality they constitute an active part of the landscape. Landscape, I suggest, can be a composite of a number of things that are tangible in physical terms but not exclusively so: a river, a mountain, a boulder or rain are parts of the landscape, and a landscape is a network of these elements that only becomes a landscape when the indexing comes together in dividual relationships of meanings and forms of experiencing within the physical environment. At the same time, these relationships between rivers, woods, lakes and the way we conceptualize them are not static: the landscape is not fixed but shifts, changes and alters depending on the questions humans ask. This allows us to consider the ‘landscape’ in terms of how the ideas which humans ‘put into’, or categorize the landscape with, act upon us in a similar way to rivers, wind, flood plains, movement and dwellings. The landscape is also composed of living actors and other elements that shape it, not only humans but also animals and plants: these actors are also part of the shared habitus and, like humans, both shape and are shaped by landscape. I suggest that this leaves traces of indexing in the landscape in the archaeological record, and that these can be seen in prehistoric art. Focusing on the understanding of landscape as constellations of relationships that span the exploitation of environmental zones from which particular foodstuffs come, to the nonverbal communication of the zones as indicated in figurines and body decoration, is one way we can try to go beyond environmentally-determined approaches to Upper Palaeolithic landscape. As will be shown below, these

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approaches need not be based solely on food procurement. I suggest that the form of multidimensional interpretation proposed here is only valid if the relationships between the elements of the landscape come together in a particular place and time, and only then play a meaningful role in human lives.

Substance At first glance we are confronted here with a contradiction that creates a dichotomy between embodiment and disembodiment, which generates culturally constructed categories. But looking at their relationships we see that these categories are linked to other beings whose sculptures and fragments are scattered across archaeological sites such as those discussed here, as if by the disembodiment of those creatures a social category is reconstituted. When talking about the figurines and their fragments and the way they have been categorised, we have to acknowledge the other representations and the material of which they are made. What we can see here is the materiality of the substance that defines the autogenous female figurines and mammoth, and the intermediary creatures such as rhino and horse, as well as other creatures represented in broken figurines. The role and meaning of the mammoth in past societies may have been versatile, dependant on with whom it was related, as well as its context, e.g. social relations between different beings could be expressed through a shape while in symbolic terms it could be visible via its substance. If we return to the sites of Kostenki 1/1/1 and Avdeevo it is interesting to observe that the mammoth shape is not broken, as if the substance from which it was made dictated that it had to be intact. At Gagarino, the presence of mammoth is only visible as the material from which the female figurines are made. The mammoth as a ‘substance’ is preserved for only one representation, the human female, and in one other case only, the horse from Avdeevo. The substance from which the mammoth sculpture was carved is shared with all other representations: cave lion, rhino, horse, bear, wolf, bird, human female. This relational link, I suggest, is the unique feature or category that allows us to distinguish between the female artists expressing their place in the world via autonomous sculpture and any other depictions. Non-fragmented female figurines were created by female artists, while the broken fragments come also from the statuettes that were made to look like self-portraiture – an observation that itself has important implications, since they could be made by persons other than the subject, and who could be defined in contemporary terms as other female or male artists. It would therefore appear that participation, via use of substances such as marl and sandstone, was open to other members of the community as well as the pregnant sculptresses. By using the process of embodiment and disembodiment in the creation, display and ‘destruction’ of autogenous figurines, prehistoric artists move from the private body to the social signification of the artists themselves, and the

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social values and norms they represented. Through such acts the notion of gender could be created. These creative acts, while often based on references to the artists’ own bodies and the bodies of others they observed around them, transcend our modern category of human (or woman), with the representation and use of materials deriving from other animals, notably mammoth, allowing us insight, I suggest, into the Palaeolithic visual vocabulary. Social signification uses this vocabulary, despite its contemporary universality as also seen in the figurines from southern Germany, does not support the argument (Poor 2010) that it is based on male and female categories as an underlying principle. The assumed relationships between female and male as well as other creatures need questioning as they are always contextually performed, which in turn is archaeologically distinguishable through looking at material culture from particular sites. This proposed system of indexing brings me to the places the sculptured creatures inhabited, the immediate world of the site and life as secondary agents (statuettes) and their fragments. What we have to remember when looking at these material culture/art objects/figurines, is that their fragments and the deposition on the site, or their absence, is the constellation of a series of relationships that might not be constant and only works when the artefacts are used in particular ways (embodiment and disembodiment) at particular times and on particular occasions. This is important since it can answer the question of why some statuettes and their fragments have been simply discarded and some were venerated. This brings me to Latour’s (2005) idea of actor-network theory, where material culture is not a reflection of the symbolic meaning but ‘an actor/entity’ who actively participates in communion and links between humans (Latour 2005: 65). These relationships, he argues, are fluid and because of this I would argue that we can find differences in the fate of the figurines after they took part in the acts of social interactions, constitution and reconstitutions of the cultural categories: We know that objects have a strange capacity of being at once compatible with social skills during certain crucial moments and then totally foreign to any human repertoire of action. … In effect, what has been designated by the term “local interaction” is the assemblage of all the other local interactions distributed elsewhere in time and space, which have been brought to bear on the scene through the relays of various non-human actors. It is the transported presence of places into ones that call articulators or localizers. (Latour 2005: 194, author’s italics) When the particular interactions have happened to objects, they lose their meaning within this particular constellation of dividual relationships and meanings. This is the reason, I suggest, that such a high number of figurines and other objects are found seemingly discarded.

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Landscape and the actor-network theory What we see as material culture are figurines, including a number of large herbivores that belonged to the Pleistocene megafauna: herbivores (woolly mammoth, woolly rhino, horse), along with omnivores (bear), carnivores (wolf, cave lion) and birds depicted in sculpture made of marl, a material that still today can be obtained locally. Looking at the fossil record, it was possible to reconstruct the diet on the basis of isotopic analyses and tooth calculus; woolly rhinos, woolly mammoths and horses were mainly grazing on grasses and steppe herbs (Hofreiter and Stewart 2009), inhabiting predominantly the Mammoth Steppe and from time to time venturing to other environmental zones including river valleys with flood plains and alluvial terraces (Guthrie 2001). The figurines represent just a small proportion of the animals procured for consumption, bone, fur, skin, fuel and material for making tools, houses etc., exploited alongside birds and fish (Table 5.1). These are some of the archaeologically detectable actors/localisers afforded by the landscape from the three main settlements of Avdeevo, Gagarino and Kostenki 1/1/1. Wolves and cave lions were versatile animals moving between the environmental zones in search of prey (Remmert 1980). The bear, due to the way it obtains food, was also versatile, moving from one environmental zone to another following seasonally available food (Heptner et al. 1998). The bear is the only mammal within the Palaeolithic visual vocabulary that is seasonally absent from the world as a result of winter hibernation. Similarly, we have depictions of water birds that migrate seasonally, coming to the area when the weather warmed up in the late spring and leaving in autumn, creating seasonal hiatuses of presence similar to that of the bear. The birds inhabited the river valley, taking advantage of the water habitat with its vegetation. We can conclude that almost all of the environmental zones are represented by the creatures living on the Mammoth Steppe, river banks and shallow waters, as well as those who move in between zones. What is interesting in such a vocabulary is the absence of what was not signified in sculpture: there are no images of any creatures that live in the water, such as fish. In a way we can argue that they were present in the past but they did not survive up to now: this could be true but they were not made from mammoth ivory, bone or marl, because if they were, they would have survived, as did other depictions. If they existed they could be a part of other relationships between the representation and substance that are not available for us to interpret and therefore, are not part of this particular interpretation of non-verbal communication and Palaeolithic visual vocabulary. Time is a constant via the presence of creatures always present in the surrounding world as well as those who ‘come’ and ‘go’, so the space and time is ‘captured’ in the material culture/sculpture.

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TABLE 5.1 Presence (P) and absence (A) of mammals, fish and birds found in the archaeo-

logical record from Avdeevo, Gagarino, Kostenki 1/1/1. Species

Archaeological Site

Mammals, fish, birds

Kostenki 1/1/1

Avdeevo

Gagarino

Woolly mammoth Horse Arctic fox Red fox Reindeer Red deer Aurochs Steppe bison Brown bear Musk ox Woolly rhinoceros Wolverine Wolf Large felid (unidentified) Saiga antelope Cave lion Hare Badger Beaver Steppe marmot European hamster Russet suslik Voles (unidentified) Northern mole vole Fish (unidentified) Birds (unidentified) Willow grouse Greylag goose Garganey Gyrfalcon

P P P P P P A A P P A P P P A A P A P A P P A P A P A A A A

P P P P P A P A P A P P P A P P P P A A A A A A A P P P P A

P A P P P A A P A A P A A A A A A A A P A P P A P A A A A P

The actors/figurines in the landscape Just as certain animals were associated with specific parts of the landscape, so too were the stone materials used to make the figurines. The only stone material used to produce the figurines is marl, a local soft stone which was simple to carve since it contained a large amount of calcium carbonate or lime. It could be easily obtained from the local area (Sinitsyn pers. comm.) and was present in the open sedimentary layers of the river valleys; for example, the Don River valley in the case of KostenkiBorshchevo culture, part of Pavlovian-Kostenki-Gravettian cultural complex that lies

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above the river terraces occupied by Upper Palaeolithic communities (Holliday et al. 2007). This stone could be gathered on the river terraces, or extracted from the slopes. The sources of the stone above the settlements could be perceived by the prehistoric communities as being in between the zone of river valleys and the Mammoth Steppe. The materiality of this substance points to the region that is not inhabited by any actors but, as a localiser, its presence symbolizes a liminal part of the landscape that at once joins and separates two different landscape zones and those who dwell in them. Marl is used in depicting animals that are versatile in the way they inhabit particular environmental zones, such as a cave lion, wolf or bear, or were much more restricted, such as a woolly rhinoceros or horse. The depictions of a woolly rhinoceros or horse are of animals that share the habitation zone of the Mammoth Steppe with the mammoth, a species which is only depicted in marl and is never broken. One of the permanent inhabitants of the river terraces captured in the visual vocabulary of the prehistoric community is the pregnant women, who produced a depiction of herself and whose depiction was produced by others. Their bodies are dressed with belts and the head has a hat made out of plant material. Ethnographic, historical and archaeological records (Adovasio et al. 1996, Barber 1991, Dockstader 1993, Ericksen et al. 2000, Hurcombe 2000, Soffer 2004) indicate that plant fibres used in the Upper Palaeolithic came from a variety of plants. They came from the wetland habitats of shallow waters around rivers, and include plants such as rushes, sweet flag or calamus, common reeds, reedmaces and sedges. We also know that some sedges grow on poor soils and were found on the Mammoth Steppe along with small-reed grasses from the grass family. Nettle needs moisture to grow and, like disturbed soil, would be found in the vicinity of human habitation sites. These plants are thus actors/localisers of two zones: wetlands in close vicinity to human habitation sites, that most possibly comes from the shallow waters around rives; and the Mammoth Steppe. So, what defines this human is being female in a particular stage of pregnancy, being adorned by the material culture related to the aquatic and steppe environment; she is always linked by substance with the creature inhabiting the Mammoth Steppe, the mammoth. While she created the self-portraiture that has not been fragmented and shared, it is made out of mammoth; this feature of a ‘not-broken’ embodiment is shared with the mammoth, which, despite being made out of marl, is never broken. Sometimes she is also linked via the substance coming from the woolly mammoth with other creatures from the Mammoth Steppe, the woolly rhino or horse. What is interesting is that the substance/mammoth ivory or bone does not transcend to other creatures living outside the Mammoth Steppe, with the exception of the physical being who made the autogenous sculptures herself. She is well located in time and space, particularly by the time of the pregnancy and the settlement. She is linked via self-portraiture to the birds with whom she shares the environmental zone of the river banks and/or shallow water via the aquatic

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plants used to produce the belts and the hats. She also shares the substance with the birds if her image is captured in sculpture by the artists, this substance unites with other animals. The images of the female figure carved in marl are broken and deposited within the settings of the site and further away in the wider landscape. While the mammoth figurines made out of marl are never broken, hence a mammoth never ‘abandons’ the site, thus in turn creating the sense of the woolly mammoth belonging to the settlement, its substance (the task or bone) in physical terms is always present, as a substance used in the production of the autogenous female figurines. Looking at these networks of associations, we can see that gender is not confined to the static female but extends to relationships between the artists and other inhabitants of their world. Gender is thus constructed and performed in the act of carving a particular substance that was shared on the one hand as a substance per se (mammoth tusk) and by wider sharing of the substance with other entities (stone). Furthermore, the gender of a particular carver was shared by the act of fragmentation with the community in which they lived in the process of self-portraiture transformation from ego into allocentric, and by sharing the image, and the copying of the self-portraiture by other community members. What separates the female from other creatures whose depictions are found on the site is the body parts; the female body, when fragmented, lives and stays in the settlement, parts of the body present and others missing, while the other animal figurines leave their heads with faces on the site, as if the sense of personal recognition by the others is vital. What goes out into the landscape, into the world, are anonymous bodies – in contrast to women, who always lack faces and who always remain anonymous to others. What is also apparent here is that one cannot separate the pregnant female from the other inhabitants of the world that represent environmental zone; the link with the creatures living in the Mammoth Steppe is the strongest, particularly when we think about the mammoth. The dividuality and unison of the mammoth and pregnant female, I would suggest, is the basis for the Palaeolithic visual vocabulary. While the other relationships are contextualised, as shown in the cases of the three archaeological sites discussed above, I would suggest that we can summarize those networks of associations as the expression of the visual vocabulary where the creatures inhabiting the environmental zones are the secondary agents in the landscape that provide categories to the primary agents, humans. By indexing these particular creatures and their embodiment, the meaning through their depiction in figurines, they act as secondary agents who carry their associated ideas and meanings in the world. In this way they create a network of relationships and dependences that is unique to Palaeolithic Central Russia but not, however, unique as a concepts to other humans, as suggested by the Palaeolithic figurines of Southern Germany, Christian iconography and contemporary art.

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Figurines from Jō mon Japan Performativity, fragmentation and dividuality in the context of actor-networktheory is not confined to early European art; it can also be seen in prehistoric Japan during the Joˉ mon period. Here however, it is not linked to ego or allocentric sculpture but human figurines that are part of the network of relationships that links the socio-economic landscape. The first clay figurines produced in Joˉ mon Japan appeared during the Early Joˉ mon period (7,000 to 5,500 years ago). They became prevalent during the 2,500 year period of Middle (5,500 to 4,500 years ago) and Late/Final Joˉ mon periods (c. 4,500 to c. 3,000 years ago) (Kobayashi 2004). An estimated total of c. 200,000 figurines and their fragments have been discovered. The number is impressive. However, if we consider the period of 2,500 years, the number of figurines produced per year is not large. We have to remember that we are still discovering new figurines and their fragments, so the number is steadily increasing, but if we multiply the number from 150 to 300 per year the number will still remain relatively small. If we look at the site of Sannai Maruyama in Aomori prefecture, in the northern part of the island of Honshu, we have good information about the number of figurines and their fragments excavated at this archaeological site (Kaner 2010, Kobayashi 2004). According to radiocarbon dating on the settlement, it was occupied for 2,000 years. Seven hundred pit buildings have been discovered, a number of wooden structures raised from the ground – possibly the storage houses – and a structure arranged from six posts (chestnut) of 1 m in diameter, each aligned on the axis of the midwinter sun set. Remains of burial practices have also been discovered at Sannai Maruyama, with hundreds of grave pits containing adults’ burials and jars used as containers to bury children. Overall, 1,600 fragments of figurines have been excavated, the majority of which belong to separate figures, and a few full human figurines. The estimated number of figurines produced per year is very small, just over one. The accumulation of figurine fragments on the site makes impressive numbers, but if we look at the period over which the figurines could be produced, broken and distributed, they become special by their rareness. It is possible that the figurines were not produced every year but every few years (pers. communication S. Kaner), which would increase the number of figurines and their numbers in circulation; but even if we posit production and deposition of figurines and their fragments every ten years the number remains very small, just over 12.

Materiality of fragmentation The centres of production, distribution and use are not constantly distributed through Japan or in time. In contrast to zoomorphic figurines, the Joˉ mon human shape figurines have been fragmented. Contrary to the European examples that were made to be whole ‘unpalatable truth that all objects were designed and created to be whole’ (Chapman and Gaydarska 2007: 15), the

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majority of Joˉ mon figurines have been produced to be broken. They have been made to break into a number of pieces in a deliberate act of the fragmentation as performance. The act of fragmentation has been embedded in to the process of making figurines from clay, so they are designed to ‘snap’. Masafumi Ono has X-rayed figurines and discovered that they show weak points that ‘encourage’ breakages (Bausch 2010). This was achieved by designing the figurines as an amalgamation of clay lumps smoothed on the surface to create whole statuettes (Figure 5.19). It has been argued by Japanese archaeologists looking at the figurines’ formal attributes that they represent the female body; while some definitely do show female attributes, others are of male bodies (Figures 5.20, 5.21). In the majority of cases ‘One of the characteristics of the figurines often taken in support of this idea are breasts or nipples which many the figures have, but we must not overlook the fact that men also have those attributes’ (Kobayashi 2004: 155). Figurine shapes differ (Figure 5.21) and we can say that often the shape looks similar to the human body in its realistic or stylized form. The figurines vary not only in shape but also in size; the large figurines were often made as a hollow clay sculpture, in contrast to smaller ones which were made from solid lumps of clay. Sometimes the heads, ears or shoulders have holes in them that would indicate places to attach ribbons, beads, feathers etc., raising the possibility that identities may have been indicated by the addition of ‘clothing’. The purpose and the meaning of these figurines has been understood by archaeologists in a number of ways: as 1) divine or supernatural beings; 2) objects in a fertility cult/mother goddess; 3) ‘as a cure for disease or injury, by functioning as “vicarious substances”, in which an injury or illness is ritually transformed from the victim to the representation of a human figure by healer or shaman’ (Bausch 2010:

FIGURE 5.19 Figurines constructed from seven independent segments to support the breakage, (redrawn by A. Szczę sny after: Bausch 2010).

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Hollow clay figures. a) unknown artist, Chobonaino, human male (interpreted as male due to the presence of facial hair and small breasts, the presence of dots in naval area is understood as hair), between 3,500 and 3,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny); b) unknown artist, Nakappara, human female, (interpreted as female due to the presence of vulva, although note lack of breasts), between c. 3,500 and 3,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

FIGURE 5.20

101); 4) as a companion in the after-life (Kaner 2010); 5) breaking as a part of prayer; 6) as a part of Joˉ mon religion; 7) mediators between life and death; 8) ‘to cement’ the enchainment of the socio-economic network.

Connecting the landscape The interpretations give us an indication of the active role that material culture/art objects/figurines played in the life of prehistoric communities and the ideas they embody. I would like to concentrate here on Bausch’s (2010) idea of enchainment (Chapman 2000) between different people, and communities in the landscape in which the broken figurines were the active members of this socio-economic network. She suggested that the small number of figurines found on the sites is due to the purposeful acts of fragmentation and removal of the figurines’ fragments from the sites and moving them to other sites in the process of social network formation and maintenance. In such interpretation, the human figurines’ fragments were the localisers/articulators of the socio-economic network by linking each site/settlement via the values/meanings they embodied.

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FIGURE 5.21 Figurines constructed from the clay lumps. a) unknown artist, Tanabatake, human female, between c. 4,500 and 3,500 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny); b) unknown artist, Isedoˉ tai, human female, between c. 3,500 and 3,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

Bausch’s account is based on figurines from four sites all part of Shakadoˉ site located in the Kofu Basin in central Japan: Tsukakoshikita A, Tsukakshikita B, Sankoˉ jindaira and Noronhara, and allows us to trace the deposition pattern of human figurines and their fragments. The majority of figurines have been scattered across the habitation areas of the sites (≥40%), followed by deposition/throwing broken figurines into the middens (29–40%), with only smaller numbers (15–36%) being excavated from the houses. What I would suggest is that, as with Upper Palaeolithic figures discussed above, these acted as localisers/articulators during specific times and performed acts. This supports Kobayashi’s idea of rituals of seasonal renewals linked with new life that not only involved the breaking of human figurines but also pottery vessels. Figurines and their fragments were the participants in a physical indexing of the networks where material objects that possess particular value/meaning take an active part and become essential in the renewal of alliances and articulating local connections. The seasonal renewal allows the discard of the objects of ‘old’ network connections, and that is a reason why so many figurine fragments are found in middens and scattered across the settlements, while those found in houses are often placed there when the house is abandoned.

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Summary Looking at the figurines while trying to interpret them by asking questions – about how they have been created, whom or what they embodied, how they have been treated in the act of fragmentation, their removal from the site, abandonment in the cultural layers or structural deposition – allows us to see the figurines and their fragments as articulators or localisers. However, the objects, when not taking an active part in the relationship within particular social or cultural constellations, are left alone/discarded, and that is a reason, I suggest, why they can be found without structural deposition but just abundant in archaeological layers. While the material culture/art objects act within the social, ritual and symbolic relationships on the site, and between the sites in the large landscape inhabited by Upper Palaeolithic and Joˉ mon communities, I would like to stress the need to remember that, while discussing material culture and its role in societies, we need to keep people in mind rather than material culture per se to avoid the dehumanisation of the past and reduction of human experiences to statistically defined patterns (Janik 2010). As in previous chapters, we have seen that approaching prehistoric and modern art objects in similar ways can lead to a better understanding of both, with Palaeolithic figurines from Russia ‘sharing’ the concepts of materiality of substance with works of contemporary artists such as Antony Gormley. Furthermore, by using their own bodies, Palaeolithic female artists, again in ways similar to Gormley, used their bodies in surpassing the corporeality of the self into the body of all. This shift from ego to allocentric body is part of the visual storytelling we encounter in the Christian tradition illustrating the life of Jesus Christ. Fragmentation of the human body was discussed not only as part of Palaeolithic visual vocabulary, but also in the context of Joˉ mon figurines that were often made to be broken, fitting the broader category of shared substances, a reflection of material culture having properties of substance that can be shared and that link humans through both cultural and physical landscapes.

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6 PORTRAITURE AND THE REVERENCE OF THE OTHER

Introduction Self-portraiture and the active role of material culture within the constellation of relationships and meanings was discussed in previous chapters, as part of the broader understanding of the human non-verbal expression of signifying particular community members via sculpture. In this chapter, through looking at prehistoric figurines from Russia and Japan, we can add a further dimension of non-verbal communication in which stress is placed on the relationship between society and the individual in portraiture. From the archaeological point of view, when analysing portraiture we concentrate on material culture, one primary data set of the discipline informing us about the past. The concept of portraiture is strongly linked with context and iconography, i.e. what it means. To link material culture with the concept of portraiture, I use a similar approach, as in the previous chapter, involving ‘articulators’ and ‘localisers’ in the context of Latour’s (2005) actor-network theory, the way material culture plays the part of an active participator in the communication and network of relationships between people.

The concept of portraiture One of the best definitions of portraiture is that proposed Borgatti (2008: 303): ‘indexing of a particular personality through material culture …’ This can be achieved through different means: by putting objects together so the meaning of one influences the other (association) (Figure 6.2b); or by projecting realistic or abstract depiction of the other or self (depiction) (Figure 6.2a). Within archaeology, even without verbalising any particular concept of portraiture, we have been looking at the process of the indexing of any one

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individual by associating her or him via material culture with the other. In my own research I have investigated how non-adults were categorised via grave material culture by looking at the major fisher-gatherer-hunter cemeteries in the southern Baltic Sea region: at Zvejnieki in Latvia and Skateholm in Sweden (Janik 2000) (Figure 6.1). I have analysed the grave goods placed with particular individuals by other community members. Such acts of indexing the dead via the placement of particular objects in the graves was based on relationships with the living, who signified the dead by the deposition and arrangement of material culture. In a way, grave goods give us a ‘window’ on the past by allowing us to see the intentionality of signifying the dead by the placing of particular items in the graves by other members of the community. In the eastern Baltic at Zvejnieki, when non-adults were buried alone or in multiple graves alongside adults, they were accompanied by grave goods; while in the western Baltic, the situation was different. Here, non-adults were buried accompanied by grave goods only when buried with adults, as if their association/relationship was defined via material culture with adults only. So, at Zvejnieki the community expressed the children/non-adults on their own ‘merits’, while children at Skateholm were defined by association with adults only. In this way we can see how the material culture was used as ‘articulators or localisers’ in shaping belonging and social relationships between members of the groups, and how that differed in relatively close communities.

FIGURE 6.1 Location of burial grounds at Skateholm, Sweden, between c. 8,000 and 2,400 years old; Zvejnieki, Latvia, between c. 9,400 and 4,600 years old (drawn by A. Szczę sny).

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As discussed in the previous chapters, we are part of the contemporary postmodern world in which there is no canon of how portraiture should look, but we still recognise the category of the portrait since it is part of our cultural background, and is one of the ways we engage with visual imagery. On the one hand, we recognise the face of Elizabeth I as the Queen (Figure 6.2a), on the other, the untidy bed of Tracey Emin provides us with other ways of making a portrait (Figure 6.2b). The bed confronts us with the associations between

Two portraits. a) unknown artist, Elizabeth I, the ‘Darnley Portrait’ of Elizabeth I c. 1575 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Elizabeth I, the Darnley Portrait. Wikimedia); b) Tracey Emin, My Bed, 1998 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2019).

FIGURE 6.2

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material culture and the person they relate to, where the items assembled by the artist tell the story she is visually communicating to us. Emin’s My Bed (Figure 6.2b) can be regarded as self-portraiture since the artist brought together artefacts which have been a part of her world to create it; by bringing together the bed she slept in, the clothes she was wearing, the newspapers she read, she has indexed herself via material culture; the items become her ‘articulators or localisers’. These different ways of conceptualising portraiture, which sometimes look so alien to one another, express the variety of ways we communicate through material culture and visual imagery. Considering portraiture as the indexing of a particular individual through material culture, Jean Borgatti (2008) proposes different categories of portraiture, including generic, indexical/referential and representational. Although not mutually exclusive, they are, however, always interpreted, explained and directed by the text or verbal communication that is absent in the majority of archaeological cases. But this does not mean that it is impossible for them to be verbalised by us today. An important aspect of such archaeological verbalisation/interpretation is the focus on the aesthetic, or how it looks (Chapter 1). Culturally based aesthetics can help us understand the visual preferences based on the meaning/metaphor/association any particular item represents.

Generic portraiture The generic category of portraiture can be seen as being united by the use of similar material culture in defining someone’s position in society: for example, a monarch is often portrayed with the particular indicators of their role. This can be seen in the visual communication of the concept of being a queen: this visually requires two associated attributes, a woman and the crown as an ‘articulator or localiser’. Any likeness to an actual individual is unnecessary. The images of Queen Elizabeth I (Figure 6.3a), Queen Elizabeth II (Figure 6.3b) and the Red Queen (Figure 6.3c) from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There share the same material culture: ‘articulator or localiser’, namely the crown, that in generic terms, turn a picture of a woman into a representation of the queen (Figure 6.3). As Alice discovered the crown articulated her being a queen: ‘But how can it have got there without me knowing it?’ she said to herself, as she lifted it off, and set it on her lap to make out what it could possibly be. It was a golden crown. (Carroll 2014: 158) What is important here is that the standardisation of an articulator/localiser needs to visually materialise the idea it conveys: the monarch. What is also important here is the process of embodiment as presented in Chapter 1: ‘I am conscious of my body via the world’ Merleau-Ponty (2002: 94) and the concept of ‘habitus’. In using the term ‘habitus’ Bourdieu refers to the ‘embodied history, internalized as second nature’. This includes ‘the active presence of the whole past of which

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FIGURE 6.3 Portraits of the queen. a) unknown artist, Elizabeth I, the ‘Darnley Portrait’ of Elizabeth I c. 1575 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Elizabeth I, the Darnley Portrait. Wikipedia); b) Chris Levine Lightness of Being, 2004 copyright 2007 Chris Levine (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Courtesy of the artist, © Chris Levine); c) John Tenniel, Alice as a Queen, 1872 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Carroll 2014).

it is a product’ and ‘gives practices their relative autonomy with respect to external determinations of the immediate present’ (Bourdieu 1992: 56). These concepts see both or either the person producing portraiture, and the person whose portrait is being made, influence a visual tradition in the act of producing portraiture,

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constructing and reconstructing the world in which they live. Our actions in everyday life and the experiences we gain through such action shape the world in which we live, while at the same time the world in which we live shapes us. If we think about aesthetics in this context, visual tradition is constituted and reconstituted in the process of producing art objects, and this explains why we have different portraits of the same queen. So, those who made the images (Figure 6.3) used their experiences and actions in different, or the same, historical circumstances of being in the world in shaping the image of the queen. What links them is a generic visual cultural metaphor, ‘articulator or localiser’. What does it mean to be a queen? A female wearing a crown – here we have an excellent example of the materialisation of ideas via particular objects.

Referential portraiture Indexical portraiture as presented by Borgatti (2008: 315) ‘Indexical works don’t claim presence, they evoke it through referential means … Such emphasises on external characteristics’. In this way material culture acts as a symbol of the institution or the idea someone embodies, rather than representing this particular institution or person per se. Understanding burial practices as a social and ritual event with strong links to ancestors has been proposed by Barrett (1994), while Sørensen (1997) has argued for the need to contextualise the meaning of material culture through time, as well as the importance of focusing on the identity of the individual buried, since she has argued that the identity of the deceased matters. Here, I am focusing on the individual buried via material culture to understand the role these artefacts played in the constitution and reconstitution of society, norms and relationships. In this way I am not looking at artefacts as a passive reflection, but rather as an active actor in creation of the web of associations and practices, as shown in the previous chapter. In the contemporary context, one of the best examples comes from work by Tracey Emin, My Bed (Figure 6.2b), which encompasses her ‘being’ via the material culture she has accumulated; newspaper, used tissues, vodka bottles, the bed and bedding, a small table, clothes, etc. By assembling these items we do not see Tracey Emin per se, but we have an image of her preferences and choices that allows us to create an idea of who she was at this particular period in time and space: the image of Emin is materialised in the material culture comprising My Bed. In an archaeological context, I will be looking at the materialisation of ideas via the prism of portraiture firstly in European Iron Age societies (3,200 to 2,600 years ago). These ideas will be traced via portraiture and the material culture buried with those who, by their role in life, embodied such ideas. The collective and individual identities were locked in the act of burial, the objects deposited in them acted as the ‘pins’ that linked and reinforced the alliances and meanings they held in life into afterlife. Furthermore, we consider the prominence of burial location: the barrow cemeteries on hilltops and besides roads, a strategy that would favour the memory of ancestors and therefore the construction of the history of families and communities. The monuments that

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comprised those extensive ‘landscapes of ancestors’, ‘acted as a mnemonic system that was central to issues of kinship, territoriality and social memory’ (Fernández-Götz 2014: 83). I suggest that by looking at specific burials and how individual identities were indexed in the objects involved in the burial, we are able to reconstruct a portrait of the person that transcends the individual into the wider social and ritual persona they embodied in the society in which they lived.

The Princes of Vix One of the best such examples of this from the European Iron Age is the burial at Vix in France, located on the route linking northern France with the Mediterranean (Figure 6.4) (Knüsel 2002, Megaw 1966). The area where the burial is situated was a focus of activity from the Early Bronze Age to the La Tène period (c. 4,500–2,100 years ago). The area is centred on a river that served as a communication link and its good soil provided the region with a strong economic base for creating wealth based on trade and agriculture. The burials discussed here and the hillfort located nearby were dated to the Hallstatt period (c. 2,600–2,400 years ago). What was remarkable about the burial was its exceptional state of preservation: it had not been subjected to looting, and survived intact from its creation to its careful archaeological excavations almost 2,500 years later.

FIGURE 6.4 Location of the major Hallstatt sites, central Europe, between c. 3,200 to 2,600 years old.

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Before looking at the grave itself, let us look at the wider cultural setting of the person who was buried, and in which the people who buried her lived (Cunliffe 2008, Harding 1994). The name Hallstatt comes from one of the richest cemeteries located in the Austrian Alps. The prosperity of the community was based on the extraction and trade of salt. In both Greek and Indo-European languages ‘hals’ means salt. In this period a number of goods circulated across the Mediterranean and Adriatic Sea and along rivers including the Danube, Rhone, Saone and Seine, which provided transportation routes beyond the Alps into central Europe. Prestige goods such as wine-drinking equipment, bronze vessels, Attic pottery and wine itself, were appreciated by the local elites of central Europe, while gold, fur, foodstuffs and slaves provided wealth and the demand to display artefacts coming from the south. The ‘prestige goods economy’ was based on the flow of commodities between the south and north and vice versa, and extravagant feasting, display and exchange of prestigious items between local elites, as well as passing prestige goods further down the social structure, created a market for southern objects and ideas. One important element in the display of a local chiefs’ power as ‘seats of nobility’ was the construction of burials that dominated the landscape alongside fortified settlements on the hilltops. In 1929, the burial of the Princes of Vix was found at Vix near Châtillon-sur-Seine, Burgundy. In 1953, excavation at the hillfort took place (Figure 6.5). The archaeological remains from the hillfort included 40,000 pottery sherds, storage buildings and houses for domestic use, some with architectural features that indicate their

FIGURE 6.5 Plan of the Vix burial, c. 2,500 years old, plan of the burial seen from the top (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Egg and France-Lanord 1987).

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appropriation by the local elite. In 2006, further excavations uncovered a hall built in the classical Greek style, interpreted in two ways: as a striking magnificent ostentatious domestic space; or a space for community feasting. These findings confirmed the importance of the person buried as someone with power and influence both among and beyond their own community. The burial mound was 5 m high and 42 m in diameter, constructed from soil and stones that protected a 3x3 m wooden chamber, and was visible from some distance, marking the identity and sense of belonging to the land by those who dominated it. The grave itself contained a variety of items assembled alongside the body. It was associated with another three mounds, discovered by the use of aerial photography. The first item found during the excavation in the 1950s was a bronze krater produced in mainland Greece. It is still today the biggest such vessel known, and is 1.64 m high and can contain 1,500 modern bottles of wine, c. 1,150 litres. It was covered by a bronze lid. Similar vessels were used in the Mediterranean and Adriatic regions, and others are also known from southern Russia. It was decorated and probably used for some time before being deposited in the burial. With the krater, other items found were: basins, silver Greek libation bowls, a Greek black-figured drinking cup and a Greek black cup, indicating trade with Greece, the Mediterranean and Adriatic as well as a familiarity with the custom of mixing wine with water. The flagon is from Etruria, indicating another direction of trade. The deceased was placed on the wagon, whose wheels were taken off and placed along the wall. The wood has disappeared but the metal fittings and parts were well preserved, allowing the reconstruction of the wagon with its four wheels. The function of the wagon is understood as ceremonial, for use in processions and burials. The use of wagons in this way is common not only in France during the Hallstatt period, but also in Germany and Austria. The removal of the wheels, however, is only found in Burgundy. The body was adorned with a number of items that reflected contact with other, often distant, regions. The most spectacular item is a golden torc or neck-ring made of 24 carat gold. Its ends are decorated with lion paws on the internal side. Small winged horses on the external sides of the ends are understood to possess magical properties, indicating travel. The shape of the horses is interpreted as representing western and central Asian rather than European species. Torcs are recognised indicators of high social status and were worn equally by men and women from the local elites. Bronze fibulas and linchpins, one gold plated, were found on the body. They were probably used to hold clothing together, while stone and amber beads were used as buttons or appliqué. Bracelets were found on both wrists: one made of slate and one of amber. One anklet made of bronze was worn on each leg. The corpse found in the grave was at first identified as male because it was thought that only a male would be buried with such rich and diverse artefacts. Later research, however, indicated that the body actually belonged to a female aged between 35 and 40 years old. She had a weakness in the pelvic area resulting in an uneven ‘waddling’ gait, with the head tilted to the right. In her youth she suffered several episodes of childhood stress, possibly linked with illness or malnutrition (Knüsel 2002). It is

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interesting that her physical disabilities did not stop her from having a powerful status within the society. Summarising the grave from a formal perspective, the burial architecture dominates the surrounding landscape, and the form of the body’s deposition and the items associated with the corpse came from different areas, whose provenances are linked with the network of relationships of which the buried individual was a part of while alive. Furthermore, the contents of the burial also indicated the form of activities expected to be needed in the afterlife, including vessels involved in sharing wine during communal gatherings (suggested by the size of the krater). If we look at the meaning of the construction of the grave and the material culture it included, we can see the burial as an ‘articulator or localiser’ of the institution or the idea someone embodies, rather than this particular person per se, making the portraiture referential.

Hochdorf A second example, the Hochdorf burial, was constructed slightly earlier than the Vix burial (Biel 1981, Cunliffe 2008, Olivier 1999). The cultural and social contexts were the same, with indexing via forms of funerary practices. The embodiment of the norms and conventions was also captured in the grave construction and material culture associated with the buried individual, again creating referential portraiture. The Hochdorf burial was discovered in 1977 near Stuttgart, BadenWürttemberg, in southern Germany. Like Vix it was not looted, providing an undisturbed ‘window’ on the past. It was well visible in the past landscape, since its original height is estimated at between 8 and 10 m and was 60 m in diameter. The tumuli/mound covering the inner chamber with the body has several different layers of construction (Figure 6.6).

FIGURE 6.6

Layers of Hochdorf burial construction, c. 2,550 years old.

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The entrance was created by a stone wall that surrounded the earth mound. Within the mound, timber logs and stones were used in constructing an outer chamber that sheltered the inner grave chamber made only with timber, 4.8 by 4.2 and 1.2 meters in height (Figure 6.7). This chamber, as at Vix, contained equipment for the storage and drinking of alcoholic beverages. Pollen from the bronze cauldron indicated that the liquid was locally produced mead rather than imported wine. The cauldron was 0.8 m in height and could hold c. 500 litres of liquid. It was decorated with three large lions, indicating its Greek origins. A drinking bowl made out of gold was found inside the vessel, and nine drinking horns decorated with gold rings and bronze handles hung from the wall of the chamber. The largest horn was made out of iron and decorated with gold. It was discovered along with the other horns on the wall behind the deceased’s head. A wagon containing nine bronze plates for serving and eating, and equipment to carve and serve the meat were part of the burial equipment, demonstrating feasting. The body belonged to a c. 40 years old male, placed on a bronze couch lined with textile. By his head, decorated with ‘punch line’, rested a birch bark hat, a comb, a razor and a nail cutter. His neck was covered by a gold band (like the torc at Vix, a symbol of nobility), two golden fibulas, a gold belt, an iron knife/dagger with golden sheath, and a golden bracelet placed by his right arm. Golden tops, part of his leather shoes, were found decorated with the same design as the hat, belt, arm band, fibulae and remains of the textile lining the couch, creating the set of artifacts linked to each other via the style of ornamentation. As in the previous example, and as was the case at Vix, we see the referential aspects of individual portraiture. We see the connections between the regions

The burial chamber of Hochdorf, over 2,500 year old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Hochdorf. Wikimedia).

FIGURE 6.7

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captured in material culture produced locally and imported; they are the ‘articulators or localiser’ of the networks of relationships between the groups and individuals. Furthermore, they point to particular practices which, while performed with the use of those objects, reinforce the social links and associations between and within societies. They also materialised the social and ritual persona of the deceased within kinship relationships, territorial dominance and ancestral affiliations. The institutional part of the ‘habitus’ was fulfilled by the referential aspect of portraiture within the ‘habitus’, where the individual embodied the production and reproduction of the norms, conventions and relationships captured in the ‘habitus’ of the Hallstatt ‘prestige goods economy’. These assemblages of material culture and the location of the burials are characteristic of the generic portraiture shared by the buried elites who were at the top of the Iron Age societies. They have goods coming from southern Europe and are part of a ‘prestige goods economy’.

Representational portraiture The third type of portraiture discussed in this chapter is representational portraiture. This ‘refers to the subject mimetically to make the person present’ (Borgatti 2008: 315). The best example to illustrate this would be an image, the representation, the physical likeness of the person shown. Unfortunately, in prehistoric

‘Major Moche sites and geographic division into northern and southern spheres’, between c. 1,900 and 1,100 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Chapdelaine 2011).

FIGURE 6.8

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Europe we have no such examples. They are, however, well documented in the Moche culture of South America.

The Moche The Moche culture is dated between c. 100 AD and 900 AD, and located along the rivers flowing from the Andes to the Pacific Ocean in the costal part of northern Peru (Bawden 1999, Chapdelaine 2011, de Bock 1988, Donnan 2004, Quilter and Castillo 2010) (Figure 6.8). It has been defined as a part of the ‘vertical archipelago’: In this socio-economic pattern, highland societies maintain separate communities in several environmental zones located at different altitudes so as to utilize their climatic, agricultural, and natural resources. While the rivers’ valleys have had the sufficient rainfall and supply of water, the irrigation of the North Coast desert by the waters carried down from the mountains the cost allow to support the densest populated region in pre Columbian South America (Swenson 2007). Moreover the various communities often specialized in particular crafts. By these means the society as a whole command a wide range of resources and economic productivity. Fundamental to this ‘archipelago’ pattern is the fact that even through geographically separated, the members of the various communities remain integral parts of the same wider unit, together with its accompanying kinship affiliation and obligations. (Bawden 1999: 79) Christopher Donnan (2010) suggested that Moche state religion had unified quality achieved by creating a cohesive set of beliefs that transcended all the regions under their control. Sacrifice Ceremony The religious beliefs described by Donnan (1976, 2010) were based on the ‘Sacrifice Ceremony’ and visualised in drawings on pottery, in pottery shapes and murals. The essential aspect of the activities related to this ceremony was to acquire sacrificial blood during the ritual act of sacrifice. Research into the origins of the individuals sacrificed has utilised mtDNA (Shimada et al. 2005, 2008) and dental studies (Sutter and Cortez 2005, Sutter and Verano 2007). Both analyses are built on scientific approaches, but the results contradict each other. The data examined in both studies comes from the Huaca de la Luna, the architectural structure with three platforms and plazas where the sacrifices took place. The mtDNA results conducted on the human remains from Plaza 3A point to the conclusion that the sacrificial victims came from the same population as the local population of the city, indicating the same ethnic population. This supports the argument that the defeated warriors were part of the local elite, who took part in the ritual fights where the looser was bled and killed during the ‘Sacrifice

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Ceremony’. The second analysis was a dental study based on samples from Plaza 3C and 3A. This study supports the argument that the warriors came from outside the local region and belonged to the population from outside the area and were not part of the local ethnic population. In summary, the first analysis argues for the individuals sacrificed as coming from the local population, while the second points to the population inhabiting more distant regions. It is difficult to take sides concerning which study to follow in constructing the argument, but what we need to keep in mind are the visual depictions of the ‘Sacrifice Ceremony’, which show one to one combat, rather than military campaigns or scenes of war, to obtain the male victims. Secondly, the pottery that visualises the warriors varies according to the age of the individuals. For example, it shows individuals whose age we can trace from being c. ten years old to mid-30s, indicating a boy growing up within the local community and probably belonging to the local elite. This suggests that, from an early age, their way of life and training installed in them the purpose of such a fight and sacrifice. They embody, via their lives, the tangible need to sacrifice and draw blood in the acts of the constitution and reconstitution of the cosmic order of which they were a part. The ‘Sacrifice Ceremony’ best known from pottery designs (Figure 6.9) consisted of various stages, each performed and acted in a similar way to the discussion of performativity in the previous chapter. First (Figure 6.9a), two male warriors from the high-status part of the society fight. Second (Figure 6.9b), the loser is stripped of his clothes, weapons and body modifications including: earrings, nose rings or head decorations; all these items are assembled into a ‘weapon bundle’. Third (Figure 6.9b), a rope is put around his neck and his face is hit to produce a nose bleed: the first act of blood-letting. The fourth (Figure 6.9b) part of the sacrificial act is parading the naked loser with the rope around his neck in front of the winner, who holds the rope in his right hand. In his left hand the winner holds the war club seen in the first part of the Ceremony, now with the ‘weapon bundle’ attached, presumably coming from the defeated fighter. One of the depictions of the ‘Sacrifice Ceremony’ shows the naked men walking towards and up the steps of the pyramid. We know from the archaeological record that these were the spaces where the sacrifices took place. Fifth (Figure 6.9c), the throats of the defeated warriors, whose hands are bound behind their back are cut, while their ‘weapon bundles’ are displayed nearby. Sixth, the blood is captured in goblets and drunk by the priests and priestesses, who are defined by particular body costume and hair gear (Figure 6.9c). Seventh, the bodies are dismembered (Figure 6.9d). This was all done to make sure that the world will be reborn via drinking and offerings of sacrificial blood. Again, as in the previous chapter, such symbolism is not alien to us. In a way Christians do something similar, except that the blood starts as wine that is transformed during the Catholic Holy Mass into the blood of Christ. In the Moche rituals, as in the Christian imagery, we can observe strong standardisation in the depictions – as discussed in Chapter 3. Donnan compares it to the Crucifixion ‘preceded by Last Supper and the

FIGURE 6.9 ‘Sacrifice Ceremony’, unknown artists, between c. 1,900 and 1,100 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Donnan 2004).

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Stations of the Cross, and followed by Resurrection’ (2010: 55). By this standardisation the metaphor is captured in the visual message that can be shared by many viewers without any other narrative or explanation needed. By standardising the image and its repetition, the meaning becomes simplified and refined, which makes it widely understood and acknowledged. The canon is established: in the Moche context, one example of such standardisation and repetition is the ‘weapon bundle’. The canon of painting the ‘weapon bundle’ was projected in the murals of official buildings that were visible from long distances and that dominated the agricultural landscape, ensuring the ‘presence’ of the ‘Sacrifice Ceremony’ with its regenerative power (Wilson 1988). It is an ‘articulator or localiser’ of the ‘Sacrifice Ceremony’, religious structures, beliefs and the process of symbolic renewal, while being real at the same time. It can be seen here as a referential indexing of the event and those who took part in it, just as the type of portraiture discussed previously in the cases of Vix and Hochdorf. Furthermore, the ‘Sacrifice Ceremony’ and its elements were also painted on the wall as an everlasting presence of the act itself that, despite being performed at a particular time of the year, was implicitly present in the lives of all members of the community throughout the year. As in the burial constructions of Vix and Hochdorf that dominated landscapes from far away, the Moche structures where the sacrificial ceremonies took place were also artificially created and dominated the surrounding landscapes (StoneMiller 2002). The main Moche temple, Hauca de La Sol, part of the large administrative and religious complex situated opposite the Huaca de La Luna, was built as a giant hill reaching 50 m in height, on low land only 5 km from the sea. The temples have been placed in the landscape in a specific position; at the intersection between the end of irrigation systems that fed the fields, the mountains and the sea. Such locations allowed the temples to be centres of renewal of life, where blood acquired in the act of a ‘Sacrifice Ceremony’ was drunk or spilled on the earth as an offering to secure the return of water from the mountains to nourish the fields (Bourget and Newman 1998, Hastorf 2003, Quilter 2002). Another medium that acted as ‘articulators or localisers’ were the clay vessels depicting warriors as active participants in the ‘Sacrifice Ceremony’, which can be categorised as what we identified previously as representational portraiture. Shaping and decorating pottery, along with the subjects painted on the vessels, became highly standardised, as did the process of manufacture. These pots were made using highly standardised double moulds and finished freehand to give each piece an individual character (Donnan 2004, Stone-Miller 2002). This ensured the reproduction of the same image, quickened the manufacturing process and guaranteed availability of the vessels when required. We see different faces with various head covers, tattoos, earrings or nose loops. Despite moulds being used to produce the vessels, the individualisation of particular images is apparent: body modification, a scarf or bandana, nose rings, earrings, painting of the face, and tattoos, were executed in a way specific to particular depictions captured in the vessel (Figure 6.10). Those modifications altered depending on

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the life trajectories of particular individuals and the embodiment of the ideas via the ‘habitus’ they took part in: ‘Symbolic power works partly through the control of other people’s bodies and belief that is given by the collectively recognised capacity to act in various way on deep-rooted linguistic and muscular patterns of behaviour, either by neutralising them or by reactivating them to function mimetically’ (Bourdieu 1992: 69). While the story of Christ comes from written records and its existence per se is disputed by some, the Moche ‘Sacrifice Ceremony’ is supported by the archaeological record. The textiles that cover the male heads of those represented on the vessels show similar patterns to the images depicting weaving. Furthermore, similar head decorations and earrings were found in graves adorning the bodies of the dead. In particular, two burials contribute to our understanding of the ‘Sacrifice Ceremony’ as a real event rather just a symbolic depiction: these are the burials from Sipán and San José de Moro (Alva 1988, 2001, Alva and Donnan 1993, Donnan and Castillo 1992). In both places we witness a tangible relationship between visual imagery on pottery and murals, and the archaeological record that reflects the material culture used during the lives of the Moche peoples, specifically relating to the ‘Sacrifice Ceremony’. This is possible through the use of ‘articulators or localisers’ as a part of the referential portraiture (Figure 6.10). In the case of Sipán’s royal tombs, grave goods accompanying the two male bodies indicated the existence in real life of the dress and the head covers shown, worn by figure A and B (Figure 6.11). Material culture similar to that associated with figure C was found in the female grave excavated at San José de Moro (Figure 6.11). The relationships between depictions showing the ‘Sacrifice Ceremony’ and the burial of real people is interpreted as a reflection of living humans, possibly leaders of society, acting as or being deities. It is possible that they were considered to have supernatural powers, comparable to European royal families in historical times. The goblets they hold in their hands contain blood, consumed as the ultimate luxury food ‘imbued with power over life and death’ (Hastorf 2003: 551). The reality of such acts of consumption is further confirmed by the chemical analysis of residues, identified as human blood, found in goblets included among the grave goods of elite burials (Bourget and Newman 1998, Hastorf 2003). Furthermore, in the internal courtyard of one of the Moche religious sites, Huace de la Luna, the remains of 70 males between 15 and 35 years old were excavated (Bourget 2001, Verano 2001). They exhibited healed injuries indicating broken limbs and skulls and had strongly developed muscle attachment to their bones, all suggesting they were warriors. Some injuries looked no more than two weeks old at the time of death, suggesting that the individuals were defeated warriors who had lost fights in the first part of the ‘Sacrifice Ceremony’ (Figure 6.9). It is understood that after the sacrificial act of drawing their blood (as seen in the lower part of the Figure 6.11) the corpses were dismembered, a process visible in the human bones from Huace de la Luna. Among the dismembered bodies, a number of

FIGURE 6.10 Double mould technique and highly individualised Moche pottery, between c. 1,900 and 1,100 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Donnan 2004).

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‘Sacrifice Ceremony’, unknown artist, between c. 1,900 and 1,100 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Donnan 2004).

FIGURE 6.11

broken pots showing male warriors allowed Bourget (2001) to suggest that the vessels themselves were active elements in the ‘Sacrifice Ceremony’. I consider these to be localisers or articulators of the event, without which the process of sacrificial offering was incomplete. Male warriors whose physical likenesses were captured in the different shaped vessels – the stirrup-spout bottle, the spout-handle bottle the jar and bowls – were painted mostly with two colours of cream and reddish/brown before firing, while black was added later (de Bock 1988). The vessels dated to the III and IV phases of pottery development (de Bock 1988, Donnan 2004), between c. 300 and c. 600/ 800 AD (Chapdelaine 2011). The shape of the vessels indicated their use as liquid holders, possibly used for libations/offerings, since the spouts were very narrow and pouring the liquid out of the pot took time and released just a small amount. Individual lives in the Sacrifice Ceremony In a few cases we can recognise the depiction of the same men by the portrayal of their face, while the modification of the presentation of their heads or bodies in the shape and painting on the vessel indicate different stages of their lives. By following the particular features of one man’s face, Donnan (2010) has distinguished the same individual and traced his life ‘captured’ in different vessels. One of the men is called ‘Long Nose’: as the nickname suggests, his long nose became a feature that allowed his identification on a number of vessels (Figure 6.12). Some pots portray him as a warrior dressed in different earrings, headdresses, scarves and bandanas. He holds various implements in his hands, depending on the vessel, and he is always fully dressed. In contrast, ‘Long Nose’s’ depiction in the last vessel as a defeated warrior has empty spaces where the earrings once were, he is naked with a rope around his neck and his wrists are tied behind his back. The material culture, and eventual lack of it, that defined him during different stages of his life carries the meaning of his status and embodies the changes he experienced.

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FIGURE 6.12 Different vessels depicting ‘Long Nose’, unknown artists, between c. 1,700 and 1,400/1,200 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Donnan 2004).

A second easily recognised individual is ‘Cut Lip’: again, the nickname comes from a facial feature, this time it is a cut upper lip (Figure 6.13). We can trace his life from around ten years old to mid-30s. Through portraiture from an early age, he was signified as one who goes through the process of rituals, events that will inevitably lead to a valiant death. ‘Cut Lip’ probably came from a noble family and his life embodied values and meanings that underpinned the beliefs of the Moche. By living in a certain way, ‘Cut Lip’ inhabited this world and by living his life as he did, he fulfilled the expectations that allowed the constitution and reconstruction of the social and religious order of which he was a part of. He was prepared to fight, and one day he would lose, become a defeated warrior and be sacrificed. Materialisation of his life and its meaning is ‘captured’ in pottery. The vessels are visually standardised, so one knows by looking at depictions of ‘Cut Lip’ that one sees a warrior and eventually a loser. We are really looking at the implicit visualisation of the ‘Sacrifice Ceremony’, the ceremony related to the wider understanding of the world of which he was a part of, where the vessels ‘are the witnesses’ to ‘Enacted belief, instilled by the childhood learning that treats the body as a living memory pad, an automaton that “leads the mind unconsciously along with it”’ (Bourdieu 1992: 68). At the same time he takes decisions and makes choices, for example about the personal adornments that, to some extent, depended on his individual preferences: face painting that is not a tattoo, since we do not see such face modification on the pots from the older age. The last images of ‘Cut Lip’ put his age in the mid-30s, and the time when he lost the fight. The vessels we know, show him as a warrior with elaborately decorated scarves and bandanas, earrings and face paintings. There is just one depiction in which the pot shows him with a plain headdress, no earrings, or body modifications, thus visually communicating the change in his status and his imminent death.

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Different vessels depicting ‘Cut Lip’, unknown artists, between c. 1,700 and 1,400/1,200 years old: a) c. ten years old; b) mid-teens; c) mid-twenties; d) midthirties (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Donnan 2004).

FIGURE 6.13

As I have said before, Moche culture was composed of different towns along the valleys of rivers leading towards the ocean, unified by one religious belief where visual imagery (including pottery) depicted men, materialising the embodiment of this particular ideology. Sometimes the same vessels depicting the same man are found in different towns as a representation of the person who transcended their own community. His image was brought to other towns where he was also recognised as an embodiment of the same beliefs and rituals. Vessels portraying one individual have been found in three locations: San Domingo, Sausal and Salamanca (Figure 6.8). The individual/s ‘captured’ in the pots embodied the materialisation of the renewal of life, sacrifice and bleeding, where their blood and flesh became a part of an entity larger than their own local area. In summary, what we can see here is the standardisation of images, allowing us to recognise different stages of an individual’s life, the embodiment and materialisation of the ideology they represent, how they look, and how their body was modified. Only through the standardisation/‘how it looks’, can the visual story be ‘seen’ since the image equals the materialisation of the idea it embodied/‘what it means’, which in turn are the pots that ‘captured’ the different stages of the individual’s life. So, we have here a combination of three types of portraiture: generic, referential and representational. The idea materialised It has been argued that the pottery discussed above was part of prestige material culture restricted by the elite for the purpose of controlling their benefits as well as ‘appropriated and owned history and tradition’ (Chapdelaine 2011, Bawden 1999, DeMarrais et al. 1996, Swenson 2007). This top-down interpretation of

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social structures and relations is summarised by Quilter (2002: 173) as a kind of ‘idealised European principality’, focusing on only one part of society and, I suggest, ignores the issue of the social contract, whereby all groups, through the process of ‘habitus’ create and assure the success of their future through unconscious acts of living, working, praying etc. The social contract exists between all members of a society participating in a successful world order. It is the flowing water that allows the renewal of crops, fulfilling life in a variety of ways. It underpins the warriors fighting and the taking of their blood during the ‘Sacrificial Ceremony’, and the farmers’ contribution to the building of the temples where these rituals took place. We know that the number of bricks used to construct Huaca de La Sol was 143 million, while 50 million were needed to build Huaca de La Luna, all requiring an enormous number of labour hours. We know, by looking at the makers’ marks on the bricks from Huaca de La Luna, that different communities donated their labour as a form of state taxation, making bricks and putting them together in the process of constructing the temples (Hastings and Moseley 1975). In these ways, everyone participated in the ‘Sacrificial Ceremony’, and contributions to the rituals were in everyone’s interest. In answering the wider question of what role the ‘Sacrifice Ceremony’ played in Moche society, we should consider that it is a part of the warriors’ ‘habitus’, which reaches towards the underlying principles of their world order in a similar way to that argued by Elizabeth Brumfiel (2004) for the Aztecs. Brumfiel argues that different groups, individuals and spheres of life are all related to cosmic and solar powers, and that this can be seen among all groups of Aztec society. In the Moche context, this was based on the concept of life renewal according to the agrarian calendar (Bastien 1978, Bawden 1999, Quilter 2002), where water coming down the hills in a process of irrigation nourishes the Earth and produces the crops and pastures for animals. In a similar way the blood obtained in the ‘Sacrifice Ceremony’ was the ultimate food of living deities that transcend life and death (Hastorf 2003). Human sacrifice is also part of the social contract between different members of Moche society: being a warrior who one day will lose the combat and be sacrificed to keep the world order that underpins the ‘habitus’ of all members of the society. This can also be seen when we employ neuroaesthetics to study Moche portraiture as captured in their pottery. As discussed in the previous chapter, the presence or absence of the face is a powerful message used by artists in non-verbal communication, evoking neurophysiological responses in viewers. Neurological research has established that we evaluate the emotional state of another person by looking at her or his face (Ekman 2003, Ekman et al. 1972, 2001, Jellema and Pecchinenda 2005, Tan et al. 2007). This principle is implicitly used in the way portraiture was constructed in Moche culture. In all cases, what we see is the face of the individual man, whose face on a vessel has the same expression of unresponsiveness or passivity as if the scene of which they are a part of has no influence on their feelings.

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This is most apparent when we look at the pottery used to visualise the stage of the ‘Sacrifice Ceremony’, when the defeated warrior is stripped of his clothing, his hands tied behind his back, and the rope put around his neck. Despite death being imminent in the near future, the facial expression is the same as that of the victorious warrior (Figures 6.9, 6.11, 6.12). So, if we look at the face itself, we can see that the emotional message is similar. Emotional state can, however, link how the body looks and what the face expresses (App et al. 2012). Pottery, in all these circumstances, supports the social contract of not displaying the dichotomy between the face, body and movement, even in the final events captured in these vessels; as if the pottery carried the emotional potency of calmness and serenity, while the body posture reinforces the message of capture and inaction. It might, however, not replicate real life, where fear, pain or disgust could be part of the emotional expression on the faces of sacrificial warriors struggling to avoid their captors, who try to draw their blood. The cultural canon overrides these physiological reactions and creates repeated standardised images showing non-emotional or passive nonverbal messages that unify Moche representational portraiture.

Summary This chapter has explored the concept of portraiture via the medium of material culture whereby individuals and societies create their identities and convey ideas and relationships. Different sets of material culture were presented to visualise the role of material culture as portraiture from generic, relational to representational. By comparing the portraitures of two British Queens, Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II, with the portraiture of the Alice from Through the Looking-Glass and material culture found in Iron Age burials, I have illustrated the way material objects materialise ideas captured in portraiture. For the purposes of this book they have been shown as separate categories, but in reality they are most often interwoven, as in the Moche pottery. Here, they were used as part of a heuristic device, leading the reader through portraiture beyond the depiction of the face. The aesthetics of objects and images, i.e. how they look, have been enticingly linked to the meanings they carry and the ideas they materialise. Portraiture is not only an aspect of the individual but carries wider meanings that connect communities, cultures and regions. We returned to the example of Christian visual vocabulary to create a better understanding of the imagery of the Moche ‘Sacrifice Ceremony’. As in previous chapters, I drew on the idea of localisers and ‘habitus’, allowing us to look at portraiture as an assemblage of material objects. This approach enabled us to view tangible remains from elaborate burials of the prehistoric French and German elites, part of the Prestige Goods Economy, in a similar way to how we look at Tracey Emin’s seminal work, My Bed.

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Bibliography Alva, W. (1988). ‘Discovering the New World’s richest un-looted tomb’, National Geographic 147(4): 510–548. Alva, W. (2001). ‘The royal tombs of Sipán: Art and power in Moche society’, in J. Pillsbury (ed.), Moche Art and Archaeology in Ancient Peru, 222–245, Studies in the History of Art 63, Centre of Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, Symposium Papers XL, Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art. Alva, W., and C. B. Donnan (1993). The Royal Tomb of Sipán, Los Angeles, CA, Fowler Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles. App, B., C. L. Reed, and D. N. McIntosh (2012). ‘Relative contributions of face and body configurations: Perceiving emotional state and motion intention’, Cognition and Emotion 26(4): 690–698. Arnold, B. (1991). ‘The deposed Princess of Vix: The need for an engendered European prehistory’, in D. Walde, and N. D. Willows (eds), The Archaeology of Gender, 366–374, Calgary: University of Calgary. Barrett, J. (1994). Fragments from Antiquity. An Archaeology of Social Life in Britain, 2900–1200 BC, Oxford: Blackwell. Bastien, J. W. (1978). Mountain of the Condor: Metaphor and ritual in an Andean Ayllu, American Ethnological Society 64. Bawden, G. (1999). Moche, Oxford: Blackwell. Biel, J. (1981). ‘The late chieftain’s grave at Hochdorf’, Antiquity 55(213): 16–21. Borgatti, J. M. (2008). ‘Constructed identities: Portraiture in world art’, in K. Zijlmans, and W. van Damme (eds), World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, 303–324, Amsterdam: Valiz. Bourdieu, P. (1992). The Logic of Practice, Oxford: Polity Press. Bourget, S. (2001). ‘Rituals of sacrifice: Its practice at Huace de la Luna and its representation in Moche iconography’, in J. Pillsbury (ed.), Moche Art and Archaeology in Ancient Peru, 89–109, Studies in the History of Art 63, Centre of Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, Symposium Papers XL, Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art. Bourget, S., and M. E. Newman (1998). ‘A toast to the ancestors: Ritual warfare and sacrificial blood in Moche culture’, Baessler-Archiv (Neue Folge) 46(1): 85–106. Brumfiel, E. M. (2004). ‘Meaning by design: Ceramics, feasting, and figured worlds in postclassic Mexico’, in J. A. Hendon, and R. A. Joyce (eds), Mesoamerican Archaeology, Theory and Practice, 239–264, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Carroll, L. (2014). Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, London: Macmillan Publishers Limited. Chapdelaine, C. (2011). ‘Recent advances in Moche archaeology’, Journal of Archaeological Research 19: 191–231. Cunliffe, B. (2008). Europe between the Oceans: Themes and Variations: 9000 BC–AD 1000, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. de Bock, E. K. (1988). Moche: Gods, Warriors, Priests, Leiden: Spryt, van Mantgem & de Does. DeMarrais, E., L. J. Castillo, and T. Earle (1996). ‘Ideology, materialization, and power strategies’, Current Anthropology 37(1): 15–31. Donnan, C. (1976). Moche Art and Iconography, Los Angeles, CA, UCLA Latin American Canter Publications: University of California. Donnan, C. (2004). Moche Portraits from Ancient Peru, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Donnan, C. (2010). ‘Moche state religion. Unifying force in Moche political organisation’, in J. Quilter, and L. J. Castillo (eds), New Perspectives on Moche Political Organization, 47– 69, Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

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Donnan, C., and L. J. Castillo (1992). ‘Finding the tomb of a Moche priestess’, Archaeology 45(6): 38–42. Egg, M., and A. France-Lanord (1987). Le Char de Vix. Rõmisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum Monographien, Mainz: Verlag des Rõmisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseum. Ekman, P. (2003). Emotions Revealed: Understanding Faces and Feelings, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Ekman, P., W. V. Friesen, and S. Ancoli (2001). ‘Facial signs of emotional experience’, in W. Gerrod Parrott (ed.), Emotions in Social Psychology: Essential Readings, 255–264, New York: Psychology Press. Ekman, P., W. V. Friesen, and P. Ellsworth (1972). Emotion in the Human Face: Guide-lines for Research and an Integration of Findings, New York: Pergamon Press. Fernández-Götz, M. (2014). Identity and Power: The Transformation of Iron Age Societies in Northeast Gau, Amsterdam Archaeological Studies, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Harding, A. (1994). ‘Reformation in barbarian Europe, 1300-600 BC’, in B. Cunliffe (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated Prehistory of Europe, 304–335, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hastings, M. C., and M. E. Moseley (1975). ‘The Adobes of Huaca de La Luna’, American Antiquity 40(2): 196–203. Hastorf, C. A. (2003). ‘Andean luxury foods: Special food for the ancestors, deities and the élite’, Antiquity 77(297): 545–554. Janik, L. (2000). ‘Construction of the individual and transmission of knowledge among Early and Mid-Holocene communities of Northern Europe’, in J. Sofaer-Derevenski (ed.), Children and Material Culture, 118–130, London and New York: Routledge. Jellema, T., and A. Pecchinenda (2005). ‘The role of theory of mind in affective priming’, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 17(Suppl): 114–115. Knüsel, C. J. (2002). ‘More Circe than Cassandra: The Princess of Vix in ritualized social context’, European Journal of Archaeology 5(3): 275–308. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social. Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Megaw, J. V. (1966). ‘The Vix burial’, Antiquity 40: 38–44. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002). Phenomenology of Perception, London and New York: Routledge. Olivier, L. (1999). ‘The Hochdorf “princely” grave and the question of the nature of archaeological funerary assemblages’, in T. Murry (ed.), Time and Archaeology, 109–138, London and New York: Routledge. Pare, C. (1992). Wagons and Wagon-Graves of the Early Iron Age in Central Europe, Oxford, Oxford University Committee for Archaeology Monograph No. 35. Quilter, J. (2002). ‘Moche politics, religion, and warfare’, Journal of World Prehistory 16(2): 145–195. Quilter, J., and L. J. Castillo (eds) (2010). New Perspectives on Moche Political Organization, Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Shimada, I., S. Ken-Ichi, W. Alva, S. Bourget, C. Chapdelaine, and S. Uceda (2008). ‘The Moche people, genetic perspective on their sociopolitical composition and organization’, in S. Bourget, and J. L. Kimberly (eds), The Art and Archaeology of the Moche: An Ancient Andean Society of the Peruvian North Coast, 179–193, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Shimada, I., S. Ken-Ichi, S. Bourget, W. Alva, and S. Uceda (2005). ‘MtDNA analysis of Mochica and Sicán populations of pre-Hispanic Peru’, in D. Reed (ed.), Biomolecular Archaeology: Genetic Approaches to the Past, 61–92, Occasional Paper No. 32, Carbondale, IL: Centre for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University.

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Sørensen, M. L. S. (1997). ‘Reading dress: The construction of social categories and identities in Bronze Age Europe’, Journal of European Archaeology 5(1): 93–114. Stone-Miller, R. R. (2002). Art of the Andes from Chavín to Inca, London and New York: Thames and Hudson. Sutter, R. C., and R. J. Cortez (2005). ‘The nature of Moche human sacrifice, a bio-archaeological perspective’, Current Anthropology 46: 521–549. Sutter, R. C., and J. W. Verano (2007). ‘Biodistance analysis of the Moche sacrificial victims from Huaca de la Luna Plaza 3C: Matrix method test of their origins’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 132: 193–206. Swenson, E. (2007). ‘Adaptive strategies or ideological innovation? Interpreting socio-political developments in the Jequetepeque Valley of Peru during Late Moche Period’, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 26: 253–282. Tan, E. G., T. Jellema, and A. Pecchinenda (2007). ‘The contribution of theory of mind with dynamic displays of facial expressions’, Proceedings of the Experimental Psychology Society 2007, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 60: 1697–1715. Verano, J. W. (2001). ‘War and death in the Moche world: Osteological evidence and visual discourse’, in J. Pillsbury (ed.), Moche Art and Archaeology in Ancient Peru, 111–126, Studies in the History of Art 63, Centre of Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, Symposium Papers XL, Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art. Wilson, D. J. (1988). Prehistoric Settlement in the Lower Santa Valley, Peru: A Regional Perspective on the Origins and Development of Complex North Coast Society, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Elizabeth I, the Darnley Portrait. Wikimedia. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ commons/a/af/Darnley_stage_3.jpg (assessed June 2019). Hochdorf. Wikimedia. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Hoch dorf_keltenmuseum0815.jpg (assessed October 2018).

7 CONCLUSION

The archaeological perspectives on non-verbal communication as presented in this book draw on our understanding of wider relationships between people, things and ideas in the past and the present. Interpreting visual art allows archaeologists to participate in the cross-disciplinary understanding of visual communication that spans archaeology, anthropology and the history of art. In focusing on material culture, I bring archaeological interpretation to the centre of looking at visual art. In the light of ideas and arguments brought out in various chapters of this book, I suggest there is no qualitative distinction between prehistoric and contemporary visual art and communication: what distinguishes contemporary Western archaeologists and art historians from non-Western ways of interpretation and seeing is the social, cultural and ideological contexts and the way we express ourselves via visual metaphors. This distinction is not unique in contrasting the past and present; it can be equally made between contemporary cultures and between parts of the world in which we live today. Looking at visual art from this perspective frees us archaeologists from the evolutionary perspectives still so prevalent in the discipline, and allows treatment of prehistoric communities within their own historical context and cultural integrity. This makes it possible to compare Hohle Fels Venus with Three Graces by Canova or Propped by Jenny Saville without prejudging which is of greater and which of a lesser value (Figure 7.1). The important concepts used by art history and anthropology in the light of archaeological inquiry have been explored and have ranged from formal to iconographic approaches: style; context; representation; aesthetics; and the role of typology. These allowed us to index visual metaphors in multiple contexts of interpretations, where the same object can be seen as a part of the construction of gender, localiser of symbolic relationships within the economic ecosystems, and social and cultural landscapes, as well as a network of relationships (as presented in Chapters 3, 5 and 6). Further to

FIGURE 7.1 a) unknown artist, Hohle Fels, female figurine, c. 35,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny); b) Antonio Canova, Three Graces, 1814 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Three Graces. Wikipedia); c) Tracey Emin, My Bed, 1998 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2019).

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this, it also permits us to look at visual communication as an integral part of relationships expressed by visual metaphors. By posing the question, ‘How contemporary is visual art?’, I have been indexing the notion of visual art where the prehistoric, historic and present day images/works of art have been viewed as objects that can be valued similarly. From such a standpoint, I hope to avoid following an evolutionary perspective on what we interpret. I was also indexing here the way in which how, and what, we see is an integral part of being human through the use of our neurophysiological capacities. What has been illustrated by numerous examples, spanning from prehistory to the present, is the lack of distinction between the way artists thousands of years ago and artists today use and manipulate our neurophysiological capacities to communicate the message that they choose to convey visually (Figure 7.2). Despite sharing neurophysiological abilities as human beings, the meaning given to the image created in specific cultural and social circumstances has to be taken into account, and only then can we start to interpret it – as presented in Chapter 2, where I have concentrated on two complementary ways of aspects of ‘seeing’ the image: formal and iconographic (Figure 7.3). As Nalbantian says, ‘art stimulates this mental synthesis within the viewer. The memory process is engaged as the painting elicits the viewer’s stored, long-term unconscious memories and puts them into dialogue with conscious short-term memory. This actualisation is to some extent open-ended and polysemic, also dependent on

FIGURE 7.2 a) Sketch made by Szczę sny after: Hans Hartung © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019); b) unknown artist, Blombos Cave, fragment of engraved ochre, between c. 100,000–75,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Engraved ochre, Blombos Cave. Wikipedia).

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Banksy, L.A. California, Untitled, Banksy, LA, 2008 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Courtesy of Pest Control Office).

FIGURE 7.3

the cultural identity of its audience and its recourse to long-term cultural memory’ (Nalbantian 2008: 359–360). The way that understanding and interpretation of art objects is a part of the western visual tradition and the way that it has influenced our interpretation of archaeological data has been shown in a number of chapters. However, I specifically concentrated on this issue in Chapter 2, the Origins of Art. Here, I proposed looking at archaeological objects from the perspective of the contemporary understanding of visual art: Instead of pretending to an authoritative originality, post-modern concentrates on the way images and symbols (‘signifiers’) shift or lose their meaning when put in different contexts (‘appropriated’), revealing (‘deconstructing’) the process by which meaning is constructed. And because no set of signifiers, from art to advertising, is original, all are implicated in the ideologies (themselves patterns of language or representation, hence ‘discourses’) of cultures that produce and/or interpret them. (Reed 2003: 272)

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As shown on the surrealistic painting by René Magritte, Clairvoyance (Figure 7.4), where we see the artist painting the bird while looking at the egg, or we might say that he is painting the egg, but what he is accomplishing, is the bird. Addressing the questions ‘who was the first artist?’ and ‘what were the first art objects that can be seen to have existed for thousands of years?’ produced a broader understanding of the notion of ‘the artist’ and one that has been shown to have existed for thousands of years. Furthermore, it could be someone like us and our extinct cousins, Neanderthals and Denisiovians, as presented in Chapter 4, the Power of Display – the Artist and the Object. Despite becoming extinct thousands of years ago, their legacy lives on in our genetic makeup; genes that might help us to be creative, skilful and diverse in the way we visually communicate. Despite the fact that the first objects previously suggested by archaeologists to indicate artistic, symbolic and aesthetic qualities have been beads and pigments, I have proposed that not those but human bodies were the ‘canvases’ where the meaning of visual communication has been created, constructed and reconstituted among individuals, groups and communities (Figure 7.5). In the process of embodiment people were parts of the world, while at the same time, by living their lives, they shape the world around them and where the notion of ‘habitus’ was exercised. The way our brains are wired is a human quality that we share, but the way we arrange the images shown in Chapter 3, the Gallery of Seeing, is unique to

FIGURE 7.4 René Magritte, Clairvoyance, 1936 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019).

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FIGURE 7.5 Tattooed bodies: a) Pazyryk, burial mound 2, male body, c. 2,400 years ago (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Rudenko 1970); b) David Beckham’s tattoos (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: David Beckham’s tattoos. beckhamtattoo).

different visual traditions. By being challenged by non-western visual traditions, this chapter focused on the notion of time and space, bring these to the forefront, where the relationships between the maker and a viewer, an audience, cannot be underestimated. Starting from this chapter, I concentrated on interactions between formal (how it looks) and iconographic (what it means) approaches as an interwoven implicit argument that is presented in the subsequent parts of the book. This approach can be seen in the interpretation of the way the Hohle Fels figurine has been visually structured as a self-portraiture by the prehistoric woman whose body has been transformed by giving birth, possibly a stillbirth (Figure 7.1). It is not an over-weight female, nor a symbol of fertility, nor an object of the male gaze; it is both subject and object at once, indexing the female experience that shaped the sculpture via the body of the sculptress after the act of giving birth when the child was still born. Despite not bringing in Bourdieu’s idea of ‘habitus’ into the early chapters it is implied in the argument and readers are invited to add it to their thinking about prehistoric art. Later in Chapter 3 I argue that, by looking at prehistoric pictures, we participate in visual narrative by being in different places at the same time. The images index a space, and social, cultural and symbolic landscapes that go beyond the Cubist revolutionary understanding of objects, where the focus was on an object rather than the three dimensional space (3D) in which actions have taken place. It is possible that by being open to incorporating other visual traditions used by, for example, ancient Egyptians or the artist who have been creating images in traditional Chinese and Japanese visual traditions, as well as embracing Cubism

FIGURE 7.6 a) unknown artist, Zalavruga rock art carvings, whale hunt, c. 4,500 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny); b) Diego Rivera, Young Man with a Fountain Pen, 1914 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: © Banco de México Diego, Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./DACS 2019).

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(Figure 7.6b), we challenge what we see beyond the Renaissance perspective. The use of visual localisers enables us to understand the mechanics of the creation of visual narratives in which two-dimensional depictions allow the viewer to see the images, as if they were in different places at the same time. This in turn suggests we should view those prehistoric images as if looking at a movie. In the social context of story-telling, the prehistoric rock art composition (Figure 7.6a) indexes the relationships between the different actors who were performing different activities while the whale was being towed to the shore. It also points to the wider relationships between different groups of individuals who come to see the image and are visually guided by the artist, who focuses our attention on the whale in the centre of the events. Exploration of movement as a neurophysiological capacity has also been explored, from the ‘static’ imagery to the moving objects that make it possible to bring the subjects of stories or events to life. Moving thaumatropes, where the animals become younger or older, dead or alive – depending how the thaumatropes were spun – swimming deer, running horses or a rhino moving its horns, were integral parts of story-telling. Thaumatropes not only materialise movement but also through such depictions of movement indicate shapeshifting, indexing one animal becoming another, the turn from youth and maturity or the passing of the seasons. Thaumatropes are the movement itself, and their use by story tellers and artists indicates the communal contexts in which the stories were told, or the personal contexts in which only one or two people were present when the thaumatrope was used to enhance and visualise the story or the event. Without such visual devices, I suggest, the dynamic nature of storytelling would not be possible and the engagement of both individual community members and the wider group as an audience would not be as successful, and the shapeshifting would not happen (Figure 7.7). Chapter 5, Disembodied Embodiment – the Corporeality of Visual Art and Interwoven Landscapes, focused on the corporeality of self, embodiment and disembodiment, where the interpretation of prehistoric figurines ranging from autogenous to allgenous representations was looked at from the different theoretical perspectives of dividuality, performativity, actor-network theory, fragmentation and performativity. In the cases discussed, the human body was seen to have been made and broken in order to be circulated or ‘retained’ at the site (Figure 7.8). The materiality of the substance the sculptures were made from, the figurines and/or the way they have been constructed gave us the possibility of tracing them and their fragments as a part of symbolic, social and cultural networks or relationships that went beyond our own categorisation of the world around us, but which is not however entirely alien to us. The brain’s capacity to recognise faces is explored here; however, this characteristic was often omitted by prehistoric artists in a similar way to Gormley’s autogenous sculptures; with the intention, I suggest, that they should not be recognisable or ‘recognized’ and become an allgenous representation (Figure 7.9).

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FIGURE 7.7 Movement by spinning action – thaumatrope. a) unknown artist, Mas d’Azil, aurochs, c. 15,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Aurochs and bison, Mas d’Azil. donsmaps); b) unknown artist, Mas d’Azil, bison, c. 15,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Aurochs and bison, Mas d’Azil. donsmaps).

FIGURE 7.8 Fragmentation. a) figurines constructed from seven independent segments to support the breakage (redrawn by A. Szczę sny after: Bausch 2010); b) kinetic Sculpture. Jim Bond, Giant Leap, 2005, photograph by John Coombes (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Courtesy of the artist. © Jim Bond).

The interpretation of autogenous figurines could be looked at from the perspective of portraiture to enhance and challenge the western visual tradition. Portraiture and Reverence for the Other, as a multi-layered idea of connections, meanings and visual expressions, was the topic of Chapter 6, where I further explored theoretical issues presented in previous chapters. The distinction between the different types of portraiture – generic, referential and representational – is kept apart as a heuristic device to present different possibilities in interpreting archaeological remains. The understanding of contemporary art as:

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FIGURE 7.9 Autogenous sculpture. Antony Gormley, UNTITLED [FOR FRANCIS], 1986, Lead, fibreglass and plaster, 188 × 119 × 34 cm, Tate Collection, London, England (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: © the artist temp image); b) unknown artist, Kostenki 1, complex 2, female figurine, c. between 28,000 to 20,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny).

the way images and symbols (‘signifiers’) shift or lose their meaning when put in different contexts (‘appropriated’), revealing (‘deconstructing’) the process by which meaning is constructed. And because no set of signifiers, from art to advertising, is original, all are implicated in the ideologies (themselves patterns of language or representation, hence ‘discourses’) of cultures that produce and/or interpret them. (Reed 2003: 272) Is significant here. The portraitures of the two individuals, one female and one male, from the Iron Age ‘prestige goods economy’, are visualised/expressed in a similar way to Emin’s use of material objects/culture in creating her ground breaking self-portrait My Bed (Figure 7.10b). The articulators/objects that adorned the bodies of the Princess of Vix (Figure 7.10a) and the Chief of Hochdorf, the foraging goods, the wagons that will carry the deceased to the other world, the containers for wine and mead, and the plates to distribute the food during the feasts ensured the continuation of the

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relationships and connections those individuals embodied in their earthy life. And the mounds covering their remains were the articulators/localisers of the visual message of a chiefdom link to the landscape and ancestral rights to the land. The idea of articulators or localisers shown in previous examples was also used to interpret the physical reality of embodiment in the ‘Sacrifice Ceremony’ practiced

FIGURE 7.10 a) Plan of the Vix burial, 2,500 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after Egg and France-Lanord 1987); b) Tracey Emin, My Bed, 1998 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2019).

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Vessels depicting ‘Long Nose’, unknown artist, c. between 1700 and 1400/1200 years ago (redrawn and amended by A. Szczę sny after: Donnan 2004).

FIGURE 7.11

in Moche Peru as a part of the renewal of life. What is interesting in the discussion about portraiture and Moche pottery is the context of visual communication as well as the interplay of archaeological records with what we see on the murals at the temples, pottery decorations and subjects. Archaeological data that reflects the real lives of Moche people supports the depictions of the ‘Sacrificial Ceremony’, of fighting, blood-letting, drinking the blood from the goblets and body mutilations. Furthermore, via depictions of faces embodied in the pottery vessels we can see different men, some of them spanning various periods, from being a teenaged boy to mid-thirties. In the process of ‘habitus’ they live their lives to fulfil the ritual sacrifice, to make sure that the life of their communities continued and that the water flowed from the mountains to irrigate the fields. The message sent to us through this visual imagery provides us with the static view, where the neurophysiological capacities to recognise a face and body action provide the background to the visual narrative of ‘Sacrificial Ceremony’ (Figure 7.11). All the chapters in this book share an understanding of art via contemporary concepts and ideas and that, I suggest, brings the past into the present, also with the prehistoric artist, their intentionalities and our responses. In that way the distinction in the visual communication between past and the present, where one takes superiority over other, is no longer valid. What is important, I suggest, is the human capacity to use visual imagery to convey messages that still have the ability to influence us thousands of years after their creation.

Bibliography Bausch, I. (2010). ‘Fragmentation practices in central Japan: Middle Jomon clay figurines from Shakado’, in D. Gheorghiu and A. Cyphers (eds), Anthropomorphic and Zoomorphic Miniature Figures in Eurasia, Africa and Meso-America Morphology, Materiality, Technology, Function and Context, 99–112, British Archaeological Reports, International Series 2138.

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Donnan, C. (2004). Moche Portraits from Ancient Peru, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Egg, M., and A. France-Lanord (1987). Le Char de Vix. Rõmisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum Monographien, Mainz: Verlag des Rõmisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseum. Nalbantian, S. J. C. (2008). ‘Neuroaesthetics: Neuroscientific theory and illustration from arts’, Interdisciplinary Science Review 33(4): 357–368. Reed, C. (2003). ‘Postmodernism and the art of identity’, in N. Stangos (ed.), Concepts of Modern Art, 271–293, London: Thames and Hudson. Rudenko, S. I. (1970). Frozen Tombs of Siberia: The Pazyryk Burials of Iron Age Horsemen, Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Aurochs and bison, Mas d’Azil. donsmaps. Don Hitchcock 2014, donsmaps.com (assessed June 2019). David Beckham’s tattoos. beckhamtattoo. beckhamtattoo.com (accessed October 2017). Engraved ochre, Blombos Cave. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blombos_ Cave#/media/File:Blombos_Cave_-_3.jpg (assessed June 2019). Three Graces. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Graces_(sculpture) #/media/File:Canova-Three_Graces_0_degree_view.jpg (assessed June 2019).

INDEX

3D visual narrative, agency of seeing and 99–100 aboriginal Australian art 6 abstract vs. realistic images: prehistoric and contemporary parallels 35–38, 36 actor-network theory 180; landscape and 181–182, 182 aesthetics: as characteristic of Modern Humans 115, 116, 117; defined 58–59; visual perception and artistic preferences 13 agency of seeing: and 2D visual narrative 79–98; and 3D visual narrative 99–100; and shape-shifting 107–110, 108 agnosia 16 Alice as a Queen (Tenniel) 197, 198 Alley at Middelharnis, The (Hobbema) 8, 9 Anamorphic Man (Bond) 32, 86, 88 Ancient Egyptian art, viewpoint in 96 animal figurines, prehistoric: at Avdeevo 162, 165, 165–166, 166, 179; dividuality and 160–169, 161, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 184; at Gagarino, absence of 168; at Kostenki 157–158, 158, 160–162, 161, 164, 179; materials used for 179, 182–183 animals: ancient thaumatropes depicting 105–109, 106, 108; megafauna present at Mammoth Steppe sites 181–182, 182; theories about early human depictions of 13–14 anthropology, art history and 63–64

antiquity, art history and 48–51, 51 archaeological style, classification of 59–61, 60 archaeology, visual art and 7, 64–65 Argent, G. 140 Arnheim, Rudolf 13 art see visual art art history: contemporary approaches 51–53, 53; emergence of 48–51 art object: and the artist 48–49; defining and redefining 52–54, 128–129, 129–132, 131; the earliest art objects 128–132, 131; human body as 132–142; interpretation of 65 autogenous sculpture 73–79, 74, 75, 76, 77; Antony Gormley’s 73, 74, 171, 229; at Avdeevo 173–174, 174; and experiential art 78, 78–79; female figurines 78, 78–79; Kostenki archaeological finds 155, 155–157, 156, 159, 161; visualisation of self and other 30–32, 31 Avdeevo archaeological site 162–166, 163, 165, 166; animal figurines at 162, 165, 165–166, 166, 179; animal species present at 181, 182; female figurines at 162, 165–166, 166, 173–174, 174; performativity, fragmentation and dividuality at 165–166, 166 Azéma, M. 101 Balla, Giacomo 103 Banksy 61, 62, 114, 115, 223

234

Index

Christo (Javacheff, Christo) 53; Wrapped Pont Neuf 54 chronology, in archaeology 59–61, 60 Clairvoyance (Magritte) 224 climate, in prehistoric Europe 154–155 clothing, on prehistoric figurines 174–175 Clovis Culture spear-points 60 Cold Dark Matter (Parker) 23 colour: early hominin use of 19–20, 21; metaphoric vs. realistic use of 37–38; seeing 18, 18–21, 19, 37; symbolic use of 116, 118, 119, 124, 124–125, 134 conceptual art 53–56 Conroy, L. P. 175 contemporary visual art 52–54; archaeological interpretation and 7; prehistoric visual art and 220–223, 221, 222, 223 Craig-Martin, Martin, An Oak Tree 54–55 Creek, The (Bruegel the Younger) 87 Cristo crucificado (Cano) 150 Critical Mass (Gormley) 73, 74, 170 Cubist art 225–227, 226; parallels to prehistoric rock art 92; viewpoint in 89, 89–90 cultural evolutionism 61–64

Barrett, J. 199 beauty: defined 58–59; Renaissance ideals and 48 Beckham, David, tattoos of 140–141, 141, 225 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, Holy Spirit as a Dove 152 Blombos Cave (South Africa), artefacts 118–120, 119, 120; engraved ochre fragment 24, 120, 222; shell beads 119 body modification 225; as art 129–130, 132–137, 137; in Jō mon culture 136–137, 137; in Moche culture 209–210; tattoos/tattooing 138–142, 139, 141, 225 Bohdziewicz, Anna Beata 80–81 Bond, Jim: Anamorphic Man 32, 86, 88; Giant Leap 177, 178, 228 Borgatti, Jean 194, 197, 199, 205 Bourdieu, Pierre: on enacted belief 213; ‘habitus’ concept 197–199; on symbolic power 210 brain, seeing and the see human brain; neurophysiology of seeing Braque, Georges, Houses at L’Estaque 90 Breuil, H. 49–50 BritArt 64 British Museum, Ice Age Art exhibition 50 Bruegel, Pieter, the Younger 87 Brumfiel, Elizabeth 215 burial sites, prehistoric: Hochdorf (Germany) 203, 203–205, 204; Pazyryk (Russia) 137–140, 139; Sipán and San José de Moro (Peru) 210, 211, 212; Sungir (Russia) 133–134, 134; Sungir (Russia), burials at 133–134, 134; Vix (France) 200, 200–203, 201 burials/burial practices: and grave artefacts 195, 199–200 Butler, Judith 149

Da Vinci, Leonardo 50 de Bellange, Jacques 44–45 de Jongh, Claude, Saint Lawrence 152 Denisovians 126–128, 127, 128 dividuality: concept of 149–151, 150, 152; at Gagarino 168–169; at Kostenki 160–162; of mammoth and human female 183–184 Dolní Vě stonice, female figurine 29–30, 30 Doryphoros of Polykleitos (sculpture) 50, 51 Duchamp, Marcel: Fountain 52, 53, 56, 62, 128, 129; Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 103, 104 Dürer, Albert, St. Eustace 151, 152

Calder, Andrew 28 Candidi, M. 173 Cano, Alonzo, Cristo crucificado 150 Catholicism, transubstantiation in 151 ceramics, early use of 29 Changeux, Jean-Pierre 44–45 Chapman, John 149 Chauvet Cave art 13, 24–25, 25, 35, 36, 101–102, 102; discovery and significance of 36–37 Christianity: symbolism and ritual 79–80, 80, 151, 152; Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ depicted in 149–151, 150

Elizabeth I, Darnley Portrait 27, 196, 198 Elizabeth II, portrait of (Levine) 197, 198 embodiment/disembodiment: actornetwork theory of Latour and 180; ‘habitus’ concept of Bourdieu and 197–199; prehistoric female figurines and 173, 178; use of the term 31 Emin, Tracey, My Bed 55, 196, 197, 199, 230 emotional expression, perception of 26–28, 172–173, 215–216 environment see landscape, in Palaeolithic visual vocabulary

Index

Europe, prehistoric climate and human adaptation in 151–154 Evans, Sarah 22 evolutionism, in art 61–64 experiential art: and autogenous sculpture 78, 78–79; prehistoric and contemporary 11, 11–12 face, seeing the 25–28, 26, 27, 130–131, 131, 172–173; and emotional expression 26–28, 172–173, 215–216 Fauvism 37 Fechner, Gustav 13 female artists, Vasari’s rejection of 48–49 female figurines, prehistoric: autogenous concept of 78, 78–79; at Avdeevo 173–174, 174; at Gagarino 168, 168–169, 179; gender constructs and 179–180; Jō mon Japan 188; at Kostenki 155, 155–160, 156, 159, 163, 164, 179; location of prehistoric finds 153; Mammoth Steppe finds 155, 155–156, 156; Pavlovian sites (Czech Republic) 29–30, 30; ‘Venus’ figurines 71, 71–73, 172 figurine-making, process and reasons for production of 29–30 flint mask, La Roche-Cotard 130–131, 131 Fountain (Duchamp) 52, 53, 56, 62, 128, 129 Fowler, C. 149 fragmentation: kinetic sculpture as contemporary example of 177, 178, 228; of prehistoric figurines 165, 169, 177, 179, 228; process and meaning of 177, 177–178 Gagarino archaeological site 166–168, 167, 179; performativity, fragmentation and dividuality at 168, 168–169 gender: Antony Gormley on 169–170; as construct 149, 172, 175–176, 179–180, 184; performativity theory of 149 Gender of the Gift, The 149 generic portraiture 197–199, 198 genetic makeup of modern populations 126–128, 127, 128 Gestalt School theory 13, 24 Giant Leap (Bond) 177, 178 Gombrich, Ernst 13 Gormley, Antony: autogenous sculpture 73, 74, 171, 229; Critical Mass II 73, 74, 170; interview 169–172; Reflection 171; Untitled 229 Greek sculpture, in antiquity 50–51, 51

235

‘habitus’ concept of Bourdieu 197–199 Hall of Bulls, Lascaux Cave (France) 49, 50 Hallstatt burial sites 200, 201 Hartung, Hans, sketch made after 24, 222 Hauca de La Luna temple (Peru) 215 Hauca de La Sol temple (Peru) 209, 210, 215 Haxby, James 27–28 Henshilwood, Christopher 119–120 Higham, Thomas 123 Hirst, Damien, Physical Impossibility of Death 7, 8 history of art, as a discipline 50–51 History of the Art of Antiquity (Winckelmann) 50 Hobbema, Meyndert, The Alley at Middelharnis 8, 9 Hochdorf (Germany), burial site 203, 203–205, 204 Hockney, David 83, 86, 90 Hohle Fels Venus 220, 221 Homo sapiens, emergence of 115; see also Modern Humans horse, Vogelherd (Germany) 8 human body: as art object 132–142, 137; seeing the 28–32, 30, 31 human brain: facial recognition and 27–28; seeing and 15–18, 16, 17, 83; visual art and 9–14, 10 human nature, Antony Gormley on 170 human sacrifice, in Moche culture 206–212, 208, 212, 215 Ikemura, Leiko, Lago with a lying figure 87, 89 Inner Vision (Zeki) 12 Japan, prehistoric see Jō mon culture (Japan) Jeanne-Claude (de Guillebon, JeanneClaude) 53, 54 Jesus Christ, depictions of 149–151, 150; in Stations of the Cross 79–80, 80 Jō mon culture (Japan): body modification in 136–137, 137; clay figurines 27, 185–189, 187, 188 Jürgensen Thomsen, Christian 59 kinetic art 100–110; movement per se 104–107, 105, 106; shape-shifting and the agency of seeing 107–110, 108; as visual illusion 101–104, 102, 103, 104 kinetic sculpture: Anamorphic Man (Bond) 32; Giant Leap (Bond) 177, 178

236

Index

Kippenberger, Martin, When It Starts Dripping 54 Kostenki archaeological site 155, 155–160, 156, 158, 159, 179; performativity, fragmentation and dividuality at 160–162 La Grotte du Renne archaeological finds 123–125, 124 La Marche rock art 25–26, 26, 101, 102 La Roche-Cotard, flint mask 130–131, 131 Lamentation upon the Dead Christ (de Bellange) 44–45 landscape, as art object 53, 54 landscape, in Palaeolithic visual vocabulary 178–179; actor-network theory and 181–182, 182 Lascaux Cave rock art 49, 50, 103; shapeshifting visual narratives in 107–108 Latour, B. 180 Le Brun, Charles 12–13 Leibowitz, Annie 80–81 Levine, Chris, Lightness of Being 197, 198 light and illumination, Palaeolithic 103 Lightness of Being (Levine) 198 line, seeing 21–25, 23, 24, 25 Lives of the Artists (Vasari) 48 Magritte, René, Clairvoyance 224 Mammoth Steppe: climate and landscape of 151–154, 153; megafauna of 181–182, 182 mammoths: depictions of 17, 160–162, 161, 165, 166, 179, 183; dividuality with the human female 183–184; at Mammoth Steppe 181–182, 182 map of the world, contemporary cartography 9 marl, prehistoric use of 160–162, 161, 181, 182–183 Mas d’Azil prehistoric cave discs 106, 106–107, 228 masculinity, Antony Gormley on 169–170 masterpiece, Vasari’s concept of 48 Matisse, Henri, The Inattentive Reader 88, 89 McDermott, L. 72–74 Mellars, Paul 121 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 10, 135 Metropolitan Museum of Art, art history timeline 51–52 Michelangelo: Pietà 149–151, 150; Sistine Chapel ceiling 49, 50 Miller, Daniel 56 Moche culture 205, 205–206; pottery depicting male warriors 212–214, 213,

214, 215–216, 231; sacrifice ceremony 206–212, 208, 212, 215 Modern Humans: emergence and characteristics of 114–117, 121; Neanderthals and 121–124, 121–126, 122, 131 Moon’s surface, culturally based interpretations of 7 Moore, H. 176 Morriss-Kay, G. 78–79 motion, neurophysiology of seeing 32, 32–35, 33, 34 motion, seeing 32, 32–35, 33, 34, 100–101 multi-vocal/polyphonic story-telling 99–100 Mulvaney, Ken 6 My Bed (Emin) 55, 196, 199, 230 Nalbantian, S. J. C. 222 Nämforsen (Sweden), rock art carvings 81–82, 82 Nassarius kraussianus shell beads 118–119, 119 Neanderthals: description of 121–122, 122; genetic contribution to modern populations 126–128, 128; interaction with early Modern Humans 121–126, 122, 131; material culture and artistic capacities of 122–126, 124, 125, 130–132, 131, 136 neurophysiology of seeing 10, 10–11, 12, 14–15; abstract images 35–38, 36; art appreciation and 12–13; the body 28–32, 30, 31; the brain 15–18, 16, 17; colour 18, 18–21, 19, 37; the face 25–28, 26, 27, 130–131, 131; line 21–25, 23, 24, 25; motion 32, 32–35, 33, 34, 100–101 Nike of Samothrace/Winged Victory 50, 51 Nizhneye Veretye, ski sledge fragments from 57 nonverbal communication 172–173; colour symbolism as 21; prehistoric line engravings as early form of 22 Nude Descending a Staircase (Duchamp) 104 Nyarlabarrbarm (Carlton) 6 Oak Tree, An (Craig-Martin) 54–55 ochre fragment, Blombos Cave (South Africa) 24, 120, 222 Onians, J. 13–14 Opie, Julian, Siren Radio Traffic 35, 36 optical illusion see visual illusion ornaments/ornamentation: early human use of 118–120, 119, 120, 121; as visual

Index

art 129–130, 132–133; Vix burial artefacts 202 owl, Chauvet Cave 24–25, 25 Palaeolithic visual vocabulary 178–179; gender constructs and 179–180; landscape and animals in 178–179, 181–183, 182; pregnant human female in 183–184 Parker, Cornelia, Cold Dark Matter 23 Parker-Pearson, M. 139 Pazyryk, prehistoric burial mounds at 137, 139 performativity 149–151; prehistoric female figurines and 160–162, 168, 168–169, 175, 184 photograph, as art object 52–53 Physical Impossibility of Death (Hirst) 7, 8 picture plane 93–96, 94, 95, 96; and prehistoric rock art 96–98, 97, 98 Pietà (Michelangelo) 149–151, 150 pigment, prehistoric use of 118, 119, 120, 121 Piranesi, Giovanni-Battista, Pyramid of Cestius 6, 7 Pisa, tower of 46, 47 plants fibres, Palaeolithic use of 183 Pliny the Elder 48, 50 Polosmak, N. V. 139–140 polyphonic/multi-vocal story-telling 99–100 portraiture: concept of 194–197, 195, 196; generic 197–199, 198; referential 199–205; representational 205–216 pottery, Moche culture 212–214, 213, 214, 215–216 pregnant human female, prehistoric selfportraiture by 183–184 prehistoric Europe, climate and environmental adaptation in 151–154 prehistoric rock art: perspective and viewpoint 90–93, 91, 92; at Zalavruga 11 Primer of Aesthetics (Fechner) 13 Pyramid of Cestius (Piranesi) 6, 7 Quilter, J. 215 Radivojević , M. 60 Raphael 48 Ratey, John 15 Reed, Christopher 55–56 referential portraiture 199–200; examples of 200, 200–205, 201, 203, 204 Reflection (Gormley) 171 Renaissance art and artists 48–50, 49

237

Renfrew, C. 14 representational portraiture: Moche artefacts as example of 205–216 rhinos, Chauvet Cave 13 Rivera, Diego, Young Man with a Fountain Pen 89, 90, 226 Roman sculpture in antiquity 50–51, 51 Rouffignac Cave, mammoth 17 sacrificial ceremony, in Moche culture 206–212, 208, 212 Saint Lawrence (de Jongh) 152 Schapiro, M. 60–61 Scythian burial mound, Pazyryk (Russia) 137–139, 139 seasons, transformation and 107–108 seeing, agency of see agency of seeing seeing, neurophysiology of see neurophysiology of seeing self-portraiture: Emin’s My Bed as 196, 197; in sculpture (see autogenous sculpture) shape-shifting, agency of seeing and 107–110, 108 Shea, John 117, 134 shell beads, Blombos Cave (South Africa) 118–119, 119 Shimamura, A. P. 18 Sipán, royal tombs at 210, 211 Siren Radio Traffic (Opie) 35, 36 Sistine Chapel ceiling (Michelangelo) 49, 50 Skateholm (Sweden), burial ground at 195 ski sledge fragments, Nizhneye Veretye 57 social contract, in Moche culture 215–216 Soffer, O. 174–175 Sørensen, M. L. S. 60, 199 spear-points, Clovis Culture 60 St. Eustace (Dürer) 151, 152 Stations of the Cross 79–80, 80 Stations of the Cross, in Christianity 79– 80, 80 story-telling see visual narrative Strathern, M. 149 Sungir (Russia), burials at 133–134, 134 symbolic behaviour: as characteristic of Modern Humans 116, 118, 119, 120, 120; and defining the art object 118–121, 119, 120, 128–130; Neanderthal capacity for 124, 124–126, 128 symbols, religious 151 Szombaty, Josef 71 Tale of Genji, The (Mitsuoka) 93, 95 Tan Tan (Morocco), human figurine 19, 19–20

238

Index

tattoos/tattooing 138–142, 139, 141; of David Beckham 140–141, 141, 225; of male body at Pazyryk burial 225; of Nazi concentration camp prisoners 141–142 Tenniel, John, Alice as a Queen 197, 198 thaumatropes 105, 105–107, 106, 108, 227, 228 Three Age System 59–61 Three Graces (Canova) 220, 221 Tilley, C. 63 tooth modification, in Jō mon culture 136–137, 137 torcs 202 trade, in Bronze Age Europe 200, 201 transfiguration, in Christianity 151; parallels between Moche sacrifice and 207 Turk, Gavin, Death of Che 73, 75 Vasari, Giorgio 48–50, 52 ‘Venus’ figurines 71, 71–73, 172; see also female figurines, prehistoric viewpoint 86–89; modern art and multiple viewpoints 89, 89–90; and multi-vocal story-telling 99–100; and prehistoric rock art 90–93, 91, 92 Virgin Mary, depictions of 149–151, 150 vision, human see neurophysiology of seeing visual art: Antony Gormley on the role of 170–171; and archaeology 64–65; and the brain 9–14, 10; contemporary approaches to 51–53, 53; defining 9–10, 45–46, 58–59; early Modern Humans, Neanderthals and 118–126, 120, 122, 124, 125; neurophysiology and the appreciation of 12–13 visual illusion 101; kinetic art as 101–104, 102, 103, 104; thaumatropes 104–107, 105, 106

visual narrative: 2D story-telling 79–98; 3D story-telling 99–100; agency of seeing 72–73, 80, 80–83, 82, 99–100; autogenous sculpture 73–77, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 78–79; the body 71, 71–72; single vs. multiple narratives 99–100 visual perception see neurophysiology of seeing visual vocabulary, defining 6–9; see also Palaeolithic visual vocabulary Vix (France), burial at 200, 200–203, 201, 229–230, 230 Western vs. non-Western visual narrative traditions 96–97, 99 whale hunt, Zalavruga rock art carving 84, 84–85, 85, 90–93, 91, 92, 96–98, 97, 98, 226, 227; as example of multi-vocal story-telling 99–100; video animation of 92, 93, 97–98, 98 When It Starts Dripping (Kippenberger) 54 Willendorf, female figurine 31 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 50–51, 52 Winged Victory of Samothrace 50, 51 world map in contemporary cartography 9 Wrapped Pont Neuf (Christo) 54 Young Man with a Fountain Pen (Rivera) 226 Zalavruga rock art carvings 81–82, 82, 84–85, 90–92, 91, 96, 97; as experiential art 11–12; hunting scene with the bow 35, 36; skiing and hunting scene 11, 33; video animation of 92, 92–93, 98; whale hunt see whale hunt, Zalavruga rock art carving Zeki, Semir 12 Zvejnieki (Latvia), burial site 195